THE EFFECTS OF EYE BEHAVIOR
ON HUMAN COMMUNICATION
[CHAPTER10]
Throughout history, we have been preoccupied with the eye and its effects on
human behavior. Do you recall the last time you heard or read one of these
phrases?
It was an icy stare.
Hes got shifty eyes.
Did you see the gleam in his eye?
Were seeing eye to eye now.
His eyes shot daggers across the room.
She could kill with a glance.
It is common to associate various eye movements with a wide range of human
emotions or traits: downward glances are associated with modesty; wide eyes with
frankness, wonder, naivete, or terror; generally immobile facial muscles and a
rather constant stare with coldness; and eyes rolled upward with fatigue or to sug-
gest that anothers behavior is a bit weird.
In addition, our society has established a number of eye-related norms: We
must not look too long at strangers in public places; we must not make eye contact
for too long; and we are not supposed to look at various parts of the body except
under certain conditions, to name a few.
Fascination with eyes has led to the exploration of almost every conceivable
feature of the eyes and the areas surrounding them. We look at eye size, color,
position, eyebrows, and wrinkles around the eyes. Eye rings are found mainly in
other animals, but some speculate that human eyebrows are residual rings,to
He speaketh not; and yet there lies a conversation in his eyes.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
295
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be raised during surprise or fear and lowered for focus during threat and anger.
Eye patchesare the colored eyelids sometimes seen in primates, but these are
not a part of the natural human communicative repertoire, although women often
use eyeliner and eye shadow to achieve a similar effect. Another nonhuman feature
that has received scholarly attention is eyespots,eye-shaped images located on
various parts of some animalsbodies. These can be seen on peacock feathers, but-
terflies, and certain fish.
Researchers have examined the degree to which eyes open or close as a reflection
of various emotional states. Some feel that excessive blinking may be associated with
various stages of anxietyas if attempting to cut off reality. Psychiatrists report that
some patients blink up to 100 times per minute; normal blinking, needed to lubricate
and protect the eyeball, occurs about 6 to 10 times per minute in adults. Some evi-
dence shows that when a person is attentive to objects in the environment, or deep
in concentrated thought, the blinking rate decreases.
Further diversity in the significance of the eyes comes from research on eye
color. Blue eyes are a genetically based marker for inhibition and shyness, and peo-
ple perceive greater dominance in men with brown eyes than blue eyes (Kleisner,
Ko!
cnar, Rubešová, & Flegr, 2010; Rosenberg & Kagan, 1987). Some eye-related
behaviors occur without much conscious awareness, such as the crinkles around
the eyes when a person is feeling genuine enjoyment, but others are used very delib-
erately. An example of the latter is the eye flash,in which the eyelids are briefly
opened without the accompanying involvement of the eyebrows, for less than a sec-
ond, used to emphasize particular words, usually adjectives (Walker & Trimboli,
1983). The eyebrow flash is yet another, but quite different gesture, discussed in
depth in Chapter 2.
Of the many eye-related topics of inquiry, this chapter focuses on two: The
first is known by terms such as eye contact,mutual glances,visual interaction,
gazing,orline of regard. The second concerns pupil dilation and constriction
under various social conditions.
GAZE AND MUTUAL GAZE
We begin by looking at the terminology we will be using: gaze and mutual gaze
(Argyle & Cook, 1976; Kleinke, 1986; Rutter, 1984). Gaze refers to an individual
looking at another person; mutual gaze refers to a situation in which two interac-
tants are looking at each other, usually in the region of the face (see Figure 10-1).
Eye contactthat is, looking specifically in each others eyesdoes not seem to be
reliably distinguished by receivers or observers from gazing at the area surrounding
the eyes (von Cranach & Ellgring, 1973). In fact, much of what is considered
looking someone in the eyeis a series of rapid, repeated scans of several parts
of the face. Indeed, if someone did look fixedly without moving the eyes, the
impression would be one of vacant staring. Gaze and mutual gazing can be reliably
assessed by observers. At a distance of 3 meters, face-directed gazing can be distin-
guished, and shifting the direction of the gaze by 1 centimeter can reliably be
detected from a distance of 1 meter. Furthermore, people tend to be accurate in
reporting the extent to which they gazed at someone during an interaction (Hall,
Murphy, & Schmid Mast, 2007).
296 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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We know that we do not look at another person the entire time we are talk-
ing to him or her, nor do we avert our gaze 100 percent of the time. What are
considered normal gazing patterns? Obviously, the answer varies according to
the background and personalities of the participants, the topic, the other persons
gazing patterns, objects of mutual interest in the environment, and so on. The
speakers fluency also affects gazing patterns. During fluent speech, speakers tend
to look at listeners much more than during hesitant speech. We will discuss some
of these factors in more detail later in this chapter. Keeping such qualifications in
mind, we can get a general idea of normal gazing patterns from research on
focused interaction between two people (e.g., Argyle & Ingham, 1972). Gener-
ally, people gaze about half the time; there are notable individual differences in
the amount of other-directed gaze; and people gaze more while listening than
while talking.
FUNCTIONS OF GAZING
Kendon (1967) identified four functions of gazing: (1) regulatoryresponses may
be demanded or suppressed by looking; (2) monitoringpeople may look at their
partner to indicate the conclusions of thought units and to check their partners
attentiveness and reactions; (3) cognitivepeople tend to look away when having
difficulty processing information or deciding what to say; and (4) expressivethe
degree and nature of involvement or emotional arousal may be revealed through
looking.
FIGURE 10-1
Mutual gaze.
Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock.com
CHAPTER 10 THE EFFECTS OF EYE BEHAVIOR ON HUMAN COMMUNICATION 297
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Our discussion follows a similar pattern, as gazing has been shown to serve
several important functions:
1. Regulating the flow of communication
2. Monitoring feedback
3. Reflecting cognitive activity
4. Expressing emotions
5. Communicating the nature of the interpersonal relationship
These functions do not operate independently; that is, visual behavior not only
sends information, it is also one of the primary methods for collecting it. Looking
at the other person as you finish an utterance may not only tell the other that it is
his or her turn to speak, it is also an occasion for you to see how he or she is react-
ing to what you have said.
REGULATING THE FLOW OF COMMUNICATION
Visual contact occurs when we want to signal that the communication channel is
open. In some instances, eye gaze establishes a virtual obligation to interact. When
you seek visual contact with your server at a restaurant, you are essentially indicat-
ing that the communication channel is open and that you want to say something to
him or her. You may recall instances when an instructor asked the class a question,
and you were sure you did not know the answer. Establishing eye contact with the
instructor was the last thing you wanted to do. Police use this knowledge to iden-
tify drivers who may be engaged in illegal activity because they consider drivers
who avoid eye contact to be suspicious. People routinely use gaze avoidance to pre-
vent unwanted social interactions. As long as we can avoid eye gaze in a seemingly
natural way, it is much easier to avoid interaction.
When passing unknown others in a public place, we typically acknowledge
them with a brief glance, but this initial glance is followed by the avoidance of
gaze unless further contact is desired, or unless the other person signals a desire
for further contact with us by gazing back or by smiling. However, the time it
takes us to look away from another person might vary as a function of a number
of factors, such as the persons attractiveness and emotional state. Belopolsky,
Devue, and Theeuwes (2011) found that it took participants longer to visually dis-
engage from an angry face than a face with a neutral or happy expression.
A length of gaze that exceeds this acknowledgment glance is likely to signal a
desire to initiate a conversation (Cary, 1978), and violation of this civil inattention
norma term coined by Goffman (1963)can produce negative feelings in the
recipients (Zuckerman, Miserandino, & Bernieri, 1983). When you want to dis-
avow social contact, your eye gaze will likely diminish. Thus, we see mutual gazing
in greeting sequences and greatly diminished gazing when we wish to bring an
encounter to an end.
Within a conversation, gazing at the other can command a nonverbal, as well
as verbal, response. Because speakers gaze less than listeners, it is the speakers gaz-
ing that determines moments of mutual looking. During these moments, it is highly
likely that the listener will respond with a listener response, also called a back-
channel response, that signifies attention (Bavelas, Coates, & Johnson, 2002).
298 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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These responses can include smiles and other facial expressions, sounds such as
mm-hmm,and head nods. Thus, the speakers behavior is an important determi-
nant of the timing of these responses. However, gazing is not the only determinant:
Listener responses also occur when people do not see each other, as when talking
on a cell phone or telephone. In these situations, people are likely to increase their
level of verbal back-channel responses, such as uh-huh,as a means of communi-
cating their attention to the speaker (Boyle, Anderson, & Newlands, 1994).
In addition to opening and closing the channel of communication and com-
manding responses from the other, eye behavior also regulates the flow of commu-
nication by providing turn-taking signals. Speakers generally look less often than
listeners. But speakers do seem to glance during grammatical breaks, at the end of
a thought unit or idea, and at the end of the utterance. Although glances at these
junctures can signal the other person to assume the speaking role, we also use
these glances to obtain feedback, to see how we are being received, and to see if
the other will let us continue. This feedback function is addressed in the next sec-
tion. The speakerlistener pattern is often choreographed as follows: As the speaker
comes to the end of an utterance or thought unit, eye gaze toward the listener will
continue as the listener assumes the speaking role; the listener will maintain gaze
until the speaking role is assumed, when he or she will look away.
Research on naturally emerging and appointed leaders in three-person male
groups has found that the leader controls the flow of conversation using this cue
pattern: The leader shows an increased tendency to engage in prolonged gaze at
someone when he is done with a speaking turn, as if inviting, or possibly instruct-
ing, that person to take the floor. Thus, male leaders do not only keep the floor for
themselves more than others (Schmid Mast, 2002), they also orchestrate who gets
the floor and when (Kalma, 1992).
A speakers gaze at the completion of an utterance may help signal the yielding
of a speaking turn, but listener-directed gazes do not always accompany the
smooth exchange of speaking turns (Beattie, 1978; Rutter, Stephenson, & White,
1978). For instance, even though the speaker glances at the listener when yielding
a speaking turn, the listener delays a response or fails to respond. Further, when a
speaker begins an anticipated lengthy response, he or she is likely to delay gazing at
the other beyond what would normally be expected. This pattern of adult gazing
and looking away during speech seems to have its roots in early childhood develop-
ment. Observations of the gazing patterns of 3- to 4-month-old infants and their
parents revealed temporal similarities between their looking-at and looking-away
sequence and the vocalizing and pausing sequences in adult conversations (Jaffe,
Stern, & Peery, 1973).
Finally, we can use our gaze to signal the presence of socially meaningful infor-
mation in the interaction environment to another person, such as a friend. If you
notice the sudden appearance of a stranger, a quick glance at him or her can cue
your friend to look that way. The mutual acknowledgment of the stranger might
prompt a change in the topic of discussion, especially if it is of a private, sensitive
nature. Or the communication might come to a close altogether if the possible
threat in the environment is sufficient to warrant evasive action. Your use of gaze
here should help your friend (or whomever you are talking with) more quickly
notice looked-at information in the environment than information located in other
CHAPTER 10 THE EFFECTS OF EYE BEHAVIOR ON HUMAN COMMUNICATION 299
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places (i.e., those areas that you are not gazing at), something referred to as the
gaze-cuing effect. The gaze-cuing effect has been observed not only in humans but
in a number of species, and is not limited to the assessment of environmental
threats (Brauer, Call, & Tomasello, 2005; Frischen, Bayliss, & Tipper, 2007).
It appears that the gaze-cuing effect can be influenced by characteristics of the
gazer, perceiver of the gaze, and contextual factors. For example, females show
quicker cue-gazing responses than do males, and more dominant-looking female
faces seem to elicit greater cue-gazing effects (in this case, being quicker to identify
a letter in the location looked at by the face that preceded it than by the face that
did not look in that direction) among female observers (Alwall, Johansson, &
Hansen, 2010; Jones, Main, Little, & DeBruine, 2011). Seeing two people look at
but not away fromeach other before they both look in one direction leads to the
gaze-cuing effect (Böckler, Knoblich, & Sebanz, 2011). Lastly, whether we look
where the gazer has looked may depend on the match between the gazersfacial
expression and what we are searching for in the environment. Kuhn and Tipples
(2011) found that participants who were looking for a threatening target were more
likely to follow the gaze of a fearful face than a happy one.
MONITORING FEEDBACK
When people seek feedback concerning the reactions of others, they gaze at the
other person. If the other person is looking back, it is usually interpreted as a sign
of attention to what is being said. Listener facial expressions and gazing suggest
not only attention but also whether the listener is interested in what is being said.
Being seen is a profound form of social acknowledgment, and its lackthe experi-
ence of having others look right through you”—undermines a persons very exis-
tence as a social being. The averted gaze of another can lead to feelings of being
ostracized (Wirth, Sacco, Hugenberg, & Williams, 2010). A child on a playground
who demands to be watched by his or her parent while doing feats on the jungle
gym is not simply asking for added safety or security. Far more importantly, the
parents gaze infuses meaning into the childs actions. Without a witness, the
actions feel pointless or even unreal. People in low-status service occupations, such
as janitors and hotel maids, often feel that a lack of visual acknowledgment by the
people they serve is dehumanizing. On the other hand, under some circumstances
being seenespecially in the sense of being watchedcan feel like a violation of
privacy and can be very uncomfortable, especially when one cannot look back at
the person watching.
Effective monitoring via gaze may have important practical consequences. In
studies of physicianpatient interaction, those physicians who engaged in more
patient-directed gaze were more accurate at recognizing the patientsdegree of
psychosocial distress (Bensing, Kerssens, & van der Pasch, 1995), and a relation
between engaging in more patient-directed gaze and obtaining more psychosocial
information from the patient has been reported by van Dulmen, Verhaak, and Bilo
(1997).
Monitoring othersreactions during group discussions is crucial to planning
responsive statements and maintaining group harmony and morale. Crosby,
Monin, and Richardson (2008) showed that when a white member of a group
300 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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made an offensive statement about blacks, visual attention was shifted to the black
member of the group, but only when listeners thought he could hear the offensive
remark. Presumably, group members wanted to know how the affected person
reacted before deciding how to respond themselves. Effective monitoring of group
members via gaze has been shown to be higher in women than men: Women
spread their gaze more evenly around a group than men do (Koch, Baehne, Kruse,
Zimmermann, & Zumbach, 2008).
REFLECTING COGNITIVE ACTIVITY
Both listeners and speakers have a tendency to avoid gazing at others when trying
to process difficult or complex ideas. This averted gaze, which may include closing
the eyes, reflects a shift in attention from external to internal matters, as well as an
effort to exclude or interrupt external stimulation, such as that inherent in the pro-
cessing of face-to-face social cues (Markson & Paterson, 2009). People avoid gaze
more on reflective questions than factual ones and on more difficult questions
more difficult in factual content or in terms of the length of the temporal search
required, as in Name a professor you currently haveversus Name a professor
you had two semesters ago(Glenberg, Schroeder, & Robertson, 1998). Further-
more, when participants were required to answer factual questions, either with their
eyes closed or while looking directly at the experimenter, performance was better in
the eyes-closed condition, thus demonstrating the functional utility of excluding
external stimulation while engaging in difficult cognitive activity. Gaze aversion also
benefits children on difficult cognitive tasks, largely by helping them manage the
cognitive demands (Doherty-Sneddon & Phelps, 2005; Glenberg, Schroeder, &
Robertson, 1998). The use of gaze aversion while answering challenging questions
appears to be something that can be taught to very young children, resulting in
superior performance (Phelps, Doherty-Sneddon, & Warnock, 2006).
The nature of cognitive activity can also influence leftward or rightward eye
movements. When a person moves his or her eyes in a particular direction, it is
thought to reflect activity in the opposite hemisphere of the brain: Left hemisphere
activity, often involving intellectual and linguistic tasks, is associated with right-
ward glances, whereas right hemisphere activity, often involving spatial or emo-
tional processing, is associated with leftward glances (Ehrlichman & Weinberger,
1978; Weisz & Adam, 1993; Wilbur & Roberts-Wilbur, 1985). Studies show that
electroencephalic activity increases in the hemisphere opposite the direction of the
eye movement, and such activity can actually be stimulated by the movements.
Individuals vary in their leftward or rightward eye-movement tendencies, with left
movers being more susceptible to hypnosis, less scientifically oriented, more
involved with feelings and inner experience, more creative, and more prone to psy-
chosomatic symptoms and the psychological defenses of repression and denial.
EXPRESSING EMOTIONS
A glance at the eye area can provide us with a good deal of information about the
emotion being expressed. In fact, greater attention to the eyes might account for
why some (women) are better than others (men) at reading emotion states on the
CHAPTER 10 THE EFFECTS OF EYE BEHAVIOR ON HUMAN COMMUNICATION 301
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face (Hall, Hutton, & Morgan, 2010). If we see tears near the eyes of a person, we
would likely conclude that he or she is emotionally moved, although without other
cues, we may not know whether the tears reflect grief, physical pain, frustration,
joy, anger, some complex blend of emotions, or feigned grief, as in crocodile tears
(i.e., tears that are not real expressions of grief). And, as we indicate later, cues such
as downcast or averted eyes are often associated with feelings of sadness, shame, or
embarrassment. The extensive studies of Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen have
given us valuable insights into facial configurations for six common, basic emotions,
shown in the photographs here. The descriptions shown pertain to the brow and
eye area, and the eye photographs are from Ekman and Friesenscollection.As
the photographs illustrate, it may be difficult to judge what emotion is being
expressed without being able to see the brows. Similarly, some expressions may be
ambiguous unless the entire face can be seen. In everyday life, of course, we encoun-
ter dynamic as opposed to static facial expressions involving the eyes and mouth
as well as facial blends in which the eyes tell one story, and other parts of the face
tell another.
SURPRISE Brows are raised so they are curved and high. Skin below the brow is
stretched. Eyelids are opened; the upper lid is raised, and the lower lid is drawn
down; and the white of the eye shows above the iris, and often below as well.
FEAR Brows are raised and drawn together. The upper eyelid is raised, exposing the
white of the eye, called the sclera, and the lower eyelid is tensed and drawn up.
DISGUST Disgust is shown primarily in the lower face and in the lower eyelids.
Lines show below the lower lid, and the lid is pushed up but not tense. The brow
is lowered, lowering the upper lid.
ANGER The brows are lowered and drawn together, and vertical lines appear
between them. The lower lid is tensed and may or may not be raised. The upper
lid is tensed and may or may not be lowered by the action of the brow. The eyes
have a hard stare and may have a bulging appearance.
Paul Ekman,
Ph.D.
Paul Ekman,
Ph.D.
Paul Ekman,
Ph.D.
Paul Ekman,
Ph.D.
302 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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HAPPINESS Happiness is shown primarily in the lower face and lower eyelids. The
lower eyelid shows wrinkles below it and may be raised but is not tense. Crows-
feet wrinkles go outward from the outer corners of the eyes.
SADNESS The inner corners of the eyebrows are drawn up. The skin below the eye-
brow is triangulated, with the inner corner up. The upper-eyelid inner corner is
raised.
The eye-tracking study of Eisenbarth and Alpers (2011) showed that participants
looked initially or relatively longer at different parts of the face when decoding specific
emotions; for instance, initial fixations to the eyes were more common with sad than
happy, angry, or fearful expressions, and longer fixations to the mouth were seen
with happy expressions. The authors interpreted this as evidence that we look at
those areas of the face that are most characteristic of each emotion state. But do the
eyes, for example, display emotion better or worse than other parts of the face?
Ekman, Friesen, and Tomkins (1971) demonstrated that the eyes were better than the
brows, forehead, or lower face for the accurate perception of fear but were less accu-
rate for anger and disgust. Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, and Jolliffe (1997) tested uni-
versity studentsaccuracy at identifying 16 emotional states, posed by an actress, by
evaluating each area separately: the eye area, including brows; the mouth area; and
the whole face. The authors included basicemotions such as angry, afraid, and
happy, and nonbasicstates such as admiring, flirtatious, arrogant, and thoughtful.
The eye region was not quite as accurately judged as the whole face for the basic
emotions but was indistinguishable for the nonbasic states (see Figure 10-2). Can you
identify the emotions posed by the person in this study? (Answers are at the end of the
chapter.) Both the eyes and the whole facewerejudgedmuchmoreaccuratelythan
the mouth. Consistent with the research by Ekman, Friesen, and Tomkins (1971),
accuracy for the mouth region, although not superior to the eye region, was similar
to that of the eye region for distinguishing disgust and anger and much lower than
the eye region for distinguishing fear.
Most research on recognizing facial expressions of emotion presents faces
with direct forward gaze. However, it has been shown that the direction in
which the eyes are gazing has an influence on judgments of emotion in the face
(Adams & Kleck, 2003, 2005). In one of the studies, a face shown with the eyes
gazing directly forward made viewers more likely to see approach-orientation
emotions, such as anger and joy, in the faces, but a face with an averted gaze
made them more likely to see avoidance-orientation emotions, such as fear and
Paul Ekman,
Ph.D.
Paul Ekman,
Ph.D.
CHAPTER 10 THE EFFECTS OF EYE BEHAVIOR ON HUMAN COMMUNICATION 303
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FIGURE 10-2
Can you judge the emotions in these eyes? (a) happy or surprised, (b) angry or afraid, (c) sad or
disgusted, (d) distressed or sad, (e) arrogant or guilty, (f) thoughtful or arrogant, (g) flirting or
happy, (h) guilty or arrogant. (See answers at end of chapter.)
Source: From Baron-Cohen S.; Wheelwright S.; Jolliffe A. T. Is There a Language of the Eyes?EvidencefromNormal
Adults, and Adults with Autism or Asperger Syndrome, Visual Cognition, Volume 4, Number 3, 1 September 1997,
pp. 311331(21), reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Group, http://www.informaworld.com).
c
a
d
b
304 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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sadness. In another study, identical facial blends of fear and anger were presented
to viewers with direct versus averted gaze; more anger was attributed to the face
that had direct gaze, and more fear was attributed to the face that had averted
gaze. Thus, when the expression was ambiguous, gaze direction influenced
emotional perception (see Figure 10-3).
FIGURE 10-2 (continued)
f
g
h
e
CHAPTER 10 THE EFFECTS OF EYE BEHAVIOR ON HUMAN COMMUNICATION 305
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COMMUNICATING THE NATURE OF THE INTERPERSONAL
RELATIONSHIP
The direct gaze of a live person is important to the initial stages of processing his
or her facial information, which obviously is relevant to the possibility of some
sort of relationship (Pönkänen, Alhoniemi, Leppänen, & Hietanen, 2011). Gazing
and mutual gazing are often indicative of the nature of the relationship between
two interactants. For instance, relationships characterized by different status or
dominance levels may be reflected in the eye patterns; one example was given
earlierthe way the leader in a group seems to pick the next speaker by gazing at
him or her. The gaze of observers also might reflect a sensitivity to status differ-
ences among people. Foulsham, Cheng, Tracy, Henrich, and Kingstone (2010)
found that participants watching a video of a decision-making group looked more
at the high-status than low-status individuals in the group.
Another indicator of status or dominance is the visual dominance ratiothe
percentage of time spent looking at another while speaking to him or her divided
by the percentage of time spent looking at him or her while he or she is speaking.
People with higher status or dominance gaze relatively more while speaking and
relatively less while listening, compared to people with lower status or dominance.
This has been observed in laboratory dyadic settings as well as in real-world work-
place settings involving groups of people (Koch, Baehne, Kruse, Zimmermann, &
Zumbach, 2010). Although subtle patterns such as these distinguish people with
FIGURE 10-3
The ambiguous fearanger blend is judged differently depending on the direction of gaze.
Source: With permission from Reginald B. Adams from Adams, R. B., Jr., & Kleck, R. E. (2005). Effects of direct and
averted of direct and averted gaze on the perception of facially communicated emotion. Emotion,5,311.
306 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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higher and lower dominance, a simple measure of overall gazing does not, accord-
ing to numerous studies (as reviewed by Hall, Coats, & Smith LeBeau, 2005).
On the other hand, stereotypes about gazing and dominance indicate a belief in
such an association. When asked to imagine how much gazing people of high or
low dominance would display, in terms of either personality or rank in a work-
place, participants thought the higher dominant person would gaze more (Carney,
Hall, & Smith LeBeau, 2005). And across many studies, when shown video
excerpts of people gazing different amounts, viewers attributed higher dominance
to those who gazed more (Hall, Coats, & Smith LeBeau, 2005).
On the flip side of visual dominance is the notion of visual egalitarianism
(Koch, Baehne, Kruse, Zimmermann, & Zumbach, 2010). Here, equality among
members of a group might be revealed in gaze patterns that suggest all members
of the group are being looked at to relatively the same extent. Koch and colleagues
found that visual egalitarianism was greater in groups headed by a female team
leader than a male team leader.
Several studies testify that we gaze more at people and things perceived as
rewarding. Efran and Broughton (1966) found that males gazed more at other
males with whom they had engaged in a friendly conversation preceding an
experiment and with those who nodded and smiled during the persons presen-
tation. Exline and Eldridge (1967) found that the same verbal communication
was decoded as being more favorable when associated with more gaze than
when presented with less gaze. Exline and Winters (1965) reported that people
avoided the eyes of an interviewer and disliked him after he had commented unfa-
vorably on their performance. Self-relevance influences responses to gaze, too.
Faces are considered more likable if the eyes are shown shifting toward the viewer
than if the eyes are shown shifting away (Mason, Tatkow, & Macrae, 2005).
Mehrabian (1972b) asked a group of people to imagine they liked a person
and to engage this person in conversation. Even in this role-playing situation,
increased gazing was associated with increased liking. Mutual liking, revealed in
the form of participantsrating of rapport, was similarly related to gazing when
interactants debated a controversial topic (Bernieri, Gillis, Davis, & Grahe, 1996).
Interestingly, when engaging in a more cooperative discussion, eye contact was not
related to rapport judgments.
Increased gazing is often considered in the context of a courtship relationship.
The maintenance of mutual gaze longer than otherwise expected is a primary way
of signaling desire for heightened intimacy. In movies, we can almost always pre-
dict when a first kiss is coming because the characters share an unusually long
mutual gaze. An increased amount of gaze can both signal a wish for more involve-
ment and be an indication that heightened involvement has occurred. In one study,
for example, single men (but not single women) showed more gazing toward an
attractive than unattractive opposite-sex interaction partner (Van Straaten, Holland,
Finkenauer, Hollenstein, & Engles, 2010). Several sources confirm an increase in gaz-
ing between two people who are seeking to develop a more intimate relationship.
Rubins (1970) analysis of engaged couples indicated more mutual gaze, and Kleinke,
Bustos, Meeker, and Staneski (1973) found that longer glances or reciprocated glances
were perceived as an indicator of a longer relationship. It may be that the amount of
gazing increases as relationships become more intimate, but it may also be true that
CHAPTER 10 THE EFFECTS OF EYE BEHAVIOR ON HUMAN COMMUNICATION 307
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after maintaining an intimate relationship for years, gazing returns to levels below
those observed during more intense stages of the relationships development.
Argyle and Dean (1965) proposed an intimacy equilibrium model to help
explain why and how much people gaze in an interpersonal interaction. This
model suggests that intimacy is a function of the amount of eye gazing, physical
proximity, intimacy of topic, and amount of smiling. Thus, gaze is part of a net-
work of other behaviors that have important relations to one another in a total sys-
tem reflective of the overall psychological intimacy in a given interaction. Clearly,
other variables might be inserted into the equation; for example, body orientation,
the form of address used, tone of voice, other facial expressions, and forward lean.
The central idea behind this proposal is that as one component of the model is
changed, one or more of the other components also will change in the opposite
direction, as a form of compensation to keep the overall intimacy or stimulation at
a constant, desired level. For example, if one person looks too much, the other may
look less, move farther away, smile less, talk less about intimate matters, and so on
to reestablish the initial desired level of intimacy. Also, when one person is forced
to increase the implied intimacy of a behaviorfor example, by standing close to
another in a crowded elevatorthe other will compensate by gazing less, talking
about impersonal topics, and so forth.
Cross-cultural research shows that in societies that emphasize a greater
amount of physical contact between mothers and infants, mutual gaze between
them is lower than in societies where the norms prescribe more physical auton-
omy and distance. Here again is evidence of a compensatory mechanism, whereby
the crucial psychological connection between mothers and infants is maintained
in different but equivalent ways. The same trade-off between physical contact
and mutual gaze has also been observed in chimpanzee motherinfant interac-
tions (Bard et al., 2005).
Although this compensatory model has received extensive support, there are
many occasions when, rather than counter or offset the others behavior, people
will reciprocate it; for example, gazing will elicit gazing, and smiling will elicit smil-
ing. This can be seen in personal interactions as well as between strangers, and
glancing at a passing stranger is likely to produce a glance in return (Patterson,
Webb, & Schwartz, 2002; Patterson et al., 2007).
Several scholars have proposed alternatives to the intimacy equilibrium model
(Cappella & Greene, 1982; Patterson, 1976) in an attempt to accommodate both
compensation and reciprocation. These theories argue that our tendency to
exchange the same behavior (i.e., to reciprocate) or to offset the others behavior
(i.e., to compensate) is a result of the type and amount of arousal we feel and
desire. A general rule suggests that we tend to reciprocate or match anothers non-
verbal behavior when the others behavior is perceived by us as congruent with our
own expectations and preferences, or when we want to initiate an upward or
downward spiral in intimacy. When our partners behavior is not congruent with
our expectations and preferences, we are more likely to enact compensatory or off-
setting behavior (see also Chapter 12).
When the relationship between the two communicators is characterized by neg-
ative attitudes, we might see a decrease in gazing and mutual gazing, but not
always. This is because gaze, like touch, can sometimes serve more to intensify or
308 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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highlight whatever feeling or intention is present at the moment than to communi-
cate a specific message. Also, gaze does not occur in isolation from other cuesa
threatening stare and a loving look may both be long, but the rest of the face is
likely to be doing quite different things.
To illustrate one of the preceding points, satisfied married couples in one study
tended to look at each other less than couples who were dissatisfied with their rela-
tionship, with this being particularly true when negative messages were exchanged
(Noller, 1980). Increased gazing served to emphasize the confrontational nature of
the relationship while simultaneously providing a way to monitor the others reac-
tions during critical moments. This is a good example of how the immediate con-
text can never be ignored when interpreting the meaning of nonverbal behavior.
A hostile or aggressive orientation may also trigger the use of staring to pro-
duce anxiety in others. A gaze of longer than 10 seconds is likely to induce irrita-
tion, if not outright discomfort, in many situations. In one study, drivers sped
away more quickly from an intersection when stared at by a pedestrian (Ellsworth,
Carlsmith, & Henson, 1972). Several studies confirm that mutual gaze is physio-
logically arousing. We can express our hostility toward another by visually and
verbally ignoring him or her, especially when the other person knows we are delib-
erately doing so. But we can insult another person by looking at that person too
much, that is, by not according him or her the public anonymity that each of us
requires at times. Sometimes you can elicit aggressive behavior from others just
because you happen to look too long at their behavior. Sometimes threats and
aggressive action can be elicited in zoo monkeys by human beings who stare at
them too long.
Thus, if we are looking for a unifying thread to link gazing patterns motivated
by positive and negative feelings toward the other, it would seem to be this: People
tend to look at those with whom they are interpersonally involved. Gazing moti-
vated by hostility or affection both suggest an interest and involvement in the inter-
personal relationship. We must rely on contextual information, and other verbal
and nonverbal cues, to decide whether to interpret extended gazing positively or
negatively.
CONDITIONS INFLUENCING GAZING PATTERNS
DISTANCE
As suggested by intimacy equilibrium theory, gazing and mutual gazing often
increase as the physical distance between two people grows. In this case, gazing
psychologically reduces the distance between communicators and allows for better
monitoring. Similarly, there may be less visual contact when the two parties feel
too close in terms of physical distance, especially if they are not well acquainted.
Reducing ones gaze in this situation, then, increases the psychological distance.
Several studies by Aiello (1972, 1977) found that extending the conversational dis-
tances to as much as 10 feet produced a steady increase in gazing for men, but for
women, being more than 6 feet from their interactant brought a sharp decline in
their gazing. It is probable that because women prefer closer interaction distances
(see Chapter 5), they may find it difficult to define interactions at relatively great
CHAPTER 10 THE EFFECTS OF EYE BEHAVIOR ON HUMAN COMMUNICATION 309
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distances as normal and friendly, and they may react by ceasing their attempts to
maintain involvement.
PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS
We would think that when interacting with a person who is disabled or stigmatized
in some way, gaze would be less frequent. The evidence in support of this is mixed,
though, and may hinge on the nature of the disability or situational demands pres-
ent during the interaction. Bowers, Crawcour, Saltuklaroglu, and Kalinowski
(2010) noted that college-aged participants were more likely to look away from a
speakers eyes when he was stuttering as opposed to speaking fluently. Kleck
(1968), on the other hand, found that the amount of gazing between nondisabled
and disabled interactants did not differ significantly from interactions between
those considered nondisabled. Possible explanations are that in such situations, the
nondisabled person is seeking information that might suggest the proper mode of
behavior, or the disabled person is a novel stimulus that arouses curiosity. These
factors would counteract any tendency to avoid eye gaze. A subsequent study,
however, found that when a strong possibility arose that a nondisabled person
would have to engage a disabled person in conversation, gaze avoidance increased.
When conversation was not expected, people without disabilities tended to stare
more at people with disabilities than those without (Thompson, 1982).
PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS AND PERSONALITY
There are definitely stereotypes about gaze and personality. Kleck and Nuessle
(1968) showed a film of people looking at their partners either 15 or 80 percent
of the time to observers, who were asked to select characteristics that typified the
interactants. Those who looked at their partner only 15 percent of the time were
labeled as cold, pessimistic, cautious, defensive, immature, evasive, submissive,
indifferent, and sensitive; those who looked 80 percent of the time were seen as
friendly, self-confident, natural, mature, and sincere. Napieralski, Brooks, and
Droney (1995) presented viewers with 1-minute videotaped interactions in which
the target person gazed for 5, 30, or 50 seconds at an interviewer. The less a person
gazed, the more state anxiety and trait anxiety were attributed to that person by
viewers.
In actual interaction, of course, gaze patterns reflect the message senders
mood, intentions, and situational factors. Nevertheless, some patterns have
emerged in the relations between gazing patterns and personality traits. Dependent
individuals seem to use eye behavior not only to communicate more positive atti-
tudes but also to elicit such attitudes when they are not forthcoming from others
(Exline & Messick, 1967). Dependent males directed more gaze toward a listener
who provided them with few, as opposed to many, social reinforcers, whereas
dominant males decreased their eye gaze with listeners who reinforced less.
Kalma (1993) distinguished between two personality styles relating to domi-
nance: sociable dominance and aggressive dominance. The sociably dominant per-
son agrees strongly with statements such as I have no problem talking in front of
a groupand No doubt Ill make a good leader.The aggressively dominant
310 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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person agrees strongly with statements such as I quickly feel aggressive with peo-
pleand I find it important to get my way.In an experimental setting, Kalma
observed people who varied on these dominance styles and found that the sociably
dominant person engaged in more mutual gaze, whereas the aggressively dominant
person engaged in more looking around; that is, they showed lack of interest in
others.
A particular kind of social dominance is sexual harassment. Male college stu-
dentsproclivity to sexually harass women was measured using a questionnaire
that asked how likely they would be to exploit a woman under varying hypotheti-
cal circumstances, such as rewarding her for sexual favors. Videotapes that were
surreptitiously made of the same men interacting at a later time with a subordinate
female revealed that, among other behaviors, the men more likely to harass
engaged in more direct eye contact with the woman (Murphy, Driscoll, & Kelly,
1999).
Self-esteem and self-confidence are associated with gazing patterns. A study of
attributions found that interviewees were rated by observers as having increasingly
lower self-esteem as their gazing decreased (Droney & Brooks, 1993). Variations in
gazing at another person during positive and negative feedback may indeed be
related to self-esteem. When receiving favorable feedback on their performance,
people with high self-esteem tended to gaze more, and negative feedback reduced
their gazing behavior. But the pattern was reversed for those with low self-esteem.
These people gazed more during feedback that criticized their performance than
during feedback that complimented it (Greene & Frandsen, 1979).
Intelligence is also a trait people display during social interactions. Evidence
shows that people who score higher on standard tests of cognitive ability, such as
an IQ test, engage in more interpersonal gaze and responsiveness, and that percei-
vers who watch these people on videotape can use these cues to accurately judge
intelligence levels (Murphy, Hall, & Colvin, 2003).
Other personality traitsas measured by the self-report of the gazershave
been associated with more gazing. Such traits include extraversion, agreeableness,
and openness (Berry & Hansen, 2000; Mobbs, 1968), although some studies do
not find correlations between gaze and personality. For example, Dabbs, Evans,
Hopper, and Purvis (1980) did not find differences in the gazing behavior of high
self-monitors and low self-monitors,
1
and Gifford (1994) failed to find associations
between interpersonal gazing and trait measures of ambitiousness, gregariousness,
warmth, unassumingness, laziness, aloofness, coldness, and arrogance.
1
This is a personality variable that indicates the extent to which a persons outer selfwhat he or she
shows to othersmatches his or her inner self from situation to situation (Snyder, 1974). A high self-
monitor tends to look for clues in the situation as to how to behave and then presents himself or her-
self (the outer self) in a manner that is consistent with those expectations. Thus, in some situations, we
might see an outer self that is different from the persons true inner self. For example, even though a
high self-monitor might not be particularly moved by an issue, he or she may act as if it is important
to him or her if others in the situation are treating it as such. The outer self that you see from a low
self-monitor, on the other hand, is more likely to be consistent from situation to situation because it
tends to reflect his or her inner self.
CHAPTER 10 THE EFFECTS OF EYE BEHAVIOR ON HUMAN COMMUNICATION 311
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Shyness is related to gazing behavior, but this correlation can depend on
whether the shy person is of a sociable or unsociable type. In a laboratory experi-
ment, Cheek and Buss (1981) classified college students on both a shyness scale
and a sociability scale and then observed them in a get-acquainted session.
Although shy individuals engaged in less gazing overall, and in more self-touching
and less talking, this effect was mainly present if the person was both shy (e.g., I
am socially somewhat awkward;I feel inhibited in social situations)and socia-
ble (e.g., I like to be with people;I prefer working with others rather than
alone). Thus, the behavioral deficits associated with shyness appear mainly in shy
people who crave social interaction; shy people who would just as soon be left
alone behaved much like people who were not shy in terms of their gazing.
Social anxiety, another related concept, is also associated with less gazing. In
one study, women who were high in social anxiety avoided eye contact with male
avatars that appeared farther away and were staring at them in a virtual reality
experimental setup (Wieser, Pauli, Grosseibl, Molzow, & Mühlberger, 2010). In
another study, in which socially anxious people were asked to present a viewpoint
to two confederates, the socially anxious ones were especially likely to reduce gaze
toward a confederate with opposing views compared to one with agreeing views
(Farabee, Holcom, Ramsey, & Cole, 1993). In an experiment in which participants
had choices of which face to look at on a computer screen, Mansell, Clark, Ehlers,
and Chen (1999) found that socially anxious people whose anxiety was heightened
by being told they would be giving a public talk avoided faces that showed emo-
tional expressions, preferring to give their visual attention to neutral-expression
faces. Under such circumstances, the socially anxious person may have an espe-
cially strong need to avoid the arousal engendered by emotional faces, which in
turn may be related to a history of finding emotionally charged social interactions
to be aversive. Highly anxious individuals also avert their eyes sooner from an
extended facial display of anger compared to less anxious individuals (Rohner,
2002). Of importance, not all studies have found greater gaze avoidance among
socially anxious individuals (Wieser & Pauli, 2009). When negative facial expres-
sions are very intense, more trait-anxious individuals actually look at them more
(Mogg, Garner, & Bradley, 2007).
As we mentioned earlier, gaze cuing refers to the automatic tendency to look in
the direction of someone elses gaze. This effect is especially pronounced when the
target persons face looks fearful. When viewers saw a fearful face with eyes
averted, as though the target person was looking at something frightening in the
environment, their own gaze shifted in that direction more than was the case when
the averted eyes were shown on a happy face (Putnam, Hermans, & van Honk,
2006). Furthermore, this effect is especially notable for viewers who are high on
trait anxiety: Highly anxious individuals are especially quick to use gaze direction
as a cue when the gazer has a fearful facial expression, suggesting that anxiety
makes a person especially visually attuned and responsive to evidence of threat in
their environment (Fox, Mathews, Calder, & Yiend, 2007; Mathews, Fox, Yield, &
Calder, 2003; Putnam, Hermans, & van Honk, 2006).
Finally, there are gender differences related to gaze avoidance and the use of
gaze. Larsen and Shackelford (1996) found that gaze-avoidant females (but not
males) were viewed negatively in terms of their social characteristics (e.g.,
312 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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disagreeable, unattractive). As shown in many studies, females look at others dur-
ing interaction more than males do, and such differences have been observed in
infancy and early childhood as well as in adulthood (Hall, 1984; Leeb & Rejskind,
2004). In addition, women are gazed at more than men are by others in an interac-
tion. (Sex differences are discussed further in Chapter 12.)
PSYCHOPATHOLOGY
A number of research studies find special gazing patterns, usually less gaze, in some
psychopathological conditions. For example, individuals with bipolar manic disor-
der showed more gaze avoidance than controls in a virtual-reality-based social
interaction (Kim et al., 2009). Depressed patients are characterized by nonspecific
gaze patterns and looking-down behaviors that revert to more normal patterns
with clinical improvement (Schelde & Hertz, 1994). Mothers with depressive
symptoms spend less time gazing at their infants, and their infants respond by
averting gaze more than control infants (Field, 1995). Paranoid schizophrenic
patients show a deficit in judging the gaze direction of others, which is consistent
with everyday conceptions of paranoia: Paranoid individuals are more likely than
comparison subjects to perceive another as looking at them, when the person is
actually looking away (Rosse, Kendrick, Wyatt, Isaac, & Deutsch, 1994).
A new term, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), has been used to represent the
nature of autistic symptoms ranging from severe (childhood disintegrative disorder)
to mild (Aspergers syndrome), with classic autism being somewhere in between the
two extremes. Of importance, deficits in either attention to or the processing of
social information, such as eye and facial cues, may be present in each case but
not necessarily to the same extent.
Clinicians and researchers cite gaze aversion, among other social interaction
deficits, as a characteristic of their autistic patients (Adrien et al., 1993; Hutt &
Ounsted, 1966; Walters, Barrett, & Feinstein, 1990). Autistic individuals also suf-
fer deficits in the ability to detect the direction of anothers gaze (Senju, Yaguchi,
Tojo, & Hasegawa, 2003), to monitor a speakers gaze direction, and to direct
someone elses gaze via the pointing gesture (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, &
Jolliffe, 1997). Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, Raste, and Plumb (2001) reported
that individuals with autism or Aspergers syndrome were less accurate overall than
normally functioning participants in judging emotions from the eye region of the
face. And Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, and Jolliffe (1997) also found that the
patients were especially impaired for nonbasicthat is, more complexexpres-
sions, and when the eye region alone was being judged as opposed to the full face.
(See Figure 10-4 for the eye expressions used in this study.) Gaze measurement con-
firmed that individuals with autism fail to use information from the eye region
when making emotion judgments (Spezio, Adolphs, Hurley, & Piven, 2007), a def-
icit that directly impacts their ability to distinguish genuine from posed smiles, for
which attention to the eye region is necessary (Boraston, Corden, Miles, Skuse, &
Blakemore, 2008).
One theory to account for these deficits holds that individuals with autism find
direct gaze to be overwhelmingly arousing, and they avoid it for that reason.
Indeed, Kliemann, Dziobek, Hatri, Steimke, and Heekeren (2010) found that
CHAPTER 10 THE EFFECTS OF EYE BEHAVIOR ON HUMAN COMMUNICATION 313
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children diagnosed with ASD were more likely than control children to move their
eyes away from the eyes of facial stimuli. Using an experimental method that var-
ied the direction of a posers gaze (looking at or away from the camera), while
zooming the image in larger to suggest an approaching person, Kylliäinen and
Hietanen (2006) found that autistic childrens skin conductance (a measure of
physiological arousal) was greater in the direct gaze compared to averted gaze con-
dition, but for control children, there was no difference. Thus, the hypothesis that
gaze is aversively arousing for autistic children was supported.
Another possibility is that there is a breakdown in the autistic persons ability
to synchronize an interaction by reciprocating another persons direct gaze. Chen
and Yoon (2011) observed that individuals who reported more autism-associated
traits did not show a greater tendency to look at eyes staring at them versus away
from them, whereas those with fewer traits did.
Efforts are underway to improve the socioemotional skills of children who suf-
fer from ASD. FaceSay is a computer program that allows these children to practice
attending to eye gaze and recognizing faces and emotions with avatar assistants,
with some positive results being reported (Hopkins et al., 2011).
Another promising, and likely related, new avenue of insight involves the role
of the neuropeptide oxytocin in the ability of humans, both those with and without
psychopathology, to develop social attachments and to be sensitive and responsive
socially. Especially relevant to the present chapter is the study of Guastella,
Mitchell, and Dadds (2007), who found that experimental administration of
oxytocin to male college students via nasal inhalation caused them to give added
attention to the eye region of faces shown to them in photographs. The authors
suggested that oxytocin administration might have therapeutic benefits for groups
such as those with schizophrenia and autism, who have chronic difficulties in social
communication (see Chapter 3). This possibility found empirical support in a study
by Andari and colleagues (2010), who noted that individuals with autism spent
more time gazing at the eyes of pictured faces after they had inhaled oxytocin.
Future therapies will likely involve a combination of interventions and will need to
be tailored to meet the specific deficits associated with the various ASDs.
TOPICS AND TASKS
Common sense suggests that the topic being discussed and the task at hand affect
the amount of gazing. We would expect, for instance, more gazing when the topic
is happy rather than sad or interesting as opposed to not. For example, one study
found that typically developing children as well as children diagnosed with high-
functioning autism exhibited more looking at an adult face when talking about a
topic of interest to them (Nadig, Lee, Singh, Bosshart, & Ozonoff, 2010). We
would expect interactants who have not developed an intimate relationship to
gaze less when discussing intimate topics, assuming other factors, such as the need
for affiliation or inclusion, are controlled. People also may gaze differently during
competitive tasks and cooperative tasks. In one study, cooperators used longer
gazes and mutual gazes to signal trust, liking, and honesty. Gazes also were used
to aid coordination. Competitors, however, seemed to use frequent, short gazes to
assess their partners intentions while not giving away their own (Foddy, 1978).
314 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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FACESAY
Children who suffer from ASD have interpersonal difficulties related to understanding other peoples emo-
tion states. Understanding othersemotion states depends, in part, on attending to their facial cues. Children
with ASD show deficits in following the eye gaze of others and appear not to use information in the eye
region of peoples faces adequately when making emotion judgments.
Symbionica, LLC, created FaceSay, which is an interactive computer game designed to help children with
ASD develop skill in recognizing facial expressions of emotion. Children with ASD play games that have
them follow the eye gaze of an avatar, focus on the eye region of an avatar, and decide whether faces are
showing the same expression.
To illustrate, in one game, a child with ASD views the head and face of a female avatar that is encircled
by various objects, including a sun, leaf, and eye mask. She says, These do look funas she scans the
objects around her head. She then says, Can you please click on the one Im looking atwhile she is look-
ing at the eye mask, which is to her right. During a pause in speaking, she looks forward at the child and
then right back to the eye mask.
The child needs to click on the object that the avatar was looking at. If he or she selects the right one
in this case, the eye maskthe avatar says, Thank you, thats just what I wanted.During this time, the
eye mask appears on the avatars face, which is looking at the child again, and the child earns a point for
the correct answer.
This game helps children with ASD focus on the eyes and gaze pattern of the avatar. Getting comfort-
able doing so, as well as gaining experience using social information from the eyes, are social skills that
can help these children interact more successfully with their peers at school.
OSTILL/Photos.com
CHAPTER 10 THE EFFECTS OF EYE BEHAVIOR ON HUMAN COMMUNICATION 315
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Discussing topics that cause embarrassment, humiliation, shame, or guilt might
be expected to engender less gazing at the other person. Looking away during such
situations may be an effort to insulate oneself against threats, arguments, informa-
tion, or even affection from the other party. When subjects were caused to fail at
an anagram task and were publicly criticized for their work, they not only reported
feeling embarrassed, but the amount of gaze slipped from 30 percent to 18 percent
(Modigliani, 1971). When people want to hide some aspect of their inner feelings,
they may try to avoid visual contactfor example, in situations where they are try-
ing to deceive a partner. The extent to which this occurs may vary with age and
personality characteristics. Young children, for example, may be more likely than
adults to break eye contact when lying than when telling the truth (McCarthy &
Lee, 2009). Exline, Thibaut, Hickey, and Gumpert (1970) designed a fascinating,
although possibly ethically unsound, experiment. A paid confederate induced
research participants to cheat on an experimental task. Later, the experimenter
interviewed the participants with the supposed purpose of understanding and eval-
uating their problem-solving methods. With some participants, the experimenter
grew increasingly suspicious during the interview and finally accused the partici-
pant of cheating and demanded an explanation. Participants included both those
who scored high and low on tests of Machiavellianism, a characteristic of a person
who uses cunning and shrewdness to achieve a goal without much regard for how
unscrupulous the means might be. Figure 10-4 shows that high Machiavellian par-
ticipants used gazing to present the appearance of innocence after being accused of
cheating; low Machiavellian participants, in contrast, continued to look away.
In the study by Bensing and colleagues mentioned earlier, physiciansaverage
levels of gaze at patients were much greater when the patients were talking about
FIGURE 10-4
Gazing, Machiavellianism, and deception.
© Cengage Learning All Rights Reserved
316 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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social and emotional topics than when talking about more physiological problems,
and levels were also high when the physicians were verbally conveying empathy or
psychosocial interest. Patients were also more satisfied with their visits when the
physicians gazed more.
Persuasion is another communicative task we often undertake. We know that
gazing can add emphasis to a particular point, but Mehrabian and Williams
(1969) found that a person trying to be persuasive gazes more overall. And
research shows that listeners judge speakers who gaze more as more persuasive,
informed, truthful, sincere, and credible, and even pictured faces appear more trust-
worthy when the eyes are showing a direct versus an averted gaze (Wyland &
Forgas, 2010). Also, compliance with a request can be enhanced if the requester
engages in more gazing within an appropriate range (Guéguen & Jacob, 2002).
The application of such findings in a simulated courtroom situation found that
witnesses who testified while looking slightly downward, rather than directly at
their questioner, were judged less credibleand the defendant for whom they were
testifying was more likely to be judged guilty (Hemsley & Doob, 1978). In another
important study, actors reenacted the actual verbal performances of surgery stu-
dents during medical school oral examinations, using a nonverbal style marked
either by direct gaze and a moderate speech rate or by indirect gaze and a slower
speech rate. Surgery faculty from 46 medical institutions who judged the compe-
tency of these reenacted oral examinations gave significantly higher scores to the
actor who used direct gaze and a moderate rate of speech, even though the answers
were the same as in the other condition (Rowland-Morin, Burchard, Garb, & Coe,
1991). It is clear from these studies that in real-life situations, the presence or
absence of gaze can have a profound impact, yet the impact can be highly unfair
or damaging. We would not want to be the honest witness, the sincere speaker, or
the competent medical student who had the misfortune to gaze less than expected.
CULTURAL AND RACIAL BACKGROUND AND RACIAL ATTITUDES
Eye behavior also varies according to the environment in which we learn social
norms. Sometimes gazing patterns show differences between contactcultures,
such as Arab cultures, and noncontactcultures, such as northern European cul-
tures (see Chapters 5, 8, and 13). Sometimes cultural rules dictate whom you
should or should not look at. One report says that in Kenya, conversations
between some men and their mothers-in-law are conducted by each party turning
his or her back to the other.
We may find different racial patterns within our own culture. Whites are found
to gaze significantly more at their partners than blacks do, and this difference may
be especially pronounced with authority figuresa tendency that could create
cross-racial misunderstanding. Some research shows blacksand whiteschanging
gazing patterns in cross-racial encounters, but the research is not consistent (Fehr &
Exline, 1987; Halberstadt, 1985). Interestingly, when a face is gazing at you as
opposed to away from you, you are likely to have better memory for it when it is of
the same race rather than a different race than you (Adams, Pauker, & Weisbuch,
2010). Also, how we process a fearful face may vary as a function of the gaze and
racial match of the person we are viewing. For instance, Adams and colleagues had
CHAPTER 10 THE EFFECTS OF EYE BEHAVIOR ON HUMAN COMMUNICATION 317
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Japanese and U.S. white participants view fearful faces from Japanese versus U.S.
white faces; greater responsiveness (namely, neural activity) was observed when the
faces were of the same race and looking away, whereas direct gaze from opposite-
race faces elicited greater neural reactions. Such findings underscore the variety of
factors that may influence and be affected by gaze in each encounter.
Of course, our cultural inclinations may be suppressed, neutralized, or empha-
sized by other forces attendant to the situation. And, although cultural experiences
may alter gazing patterns and the total amount of gaze, we may find that perceived
extremes in gaze elicit similar meanings in different cultures. For instance, too
much gazing may signal anger, threat, or disrespect; too little may signal dishon-
esty, inattention, or shyness.
Because people often enact nonverbal behavior without conscious awareness,
psychologists have suggested that nonverbal cues may sometimes be subtle indica-
tors of social attitudes, especially those that may be denied or not consciously
acknowledged, such as negative feelings toward members of minority groups
(Crosby, Bromley, & Saxe, 1980; Word, Zanna, & Cooper, 1974). Dovidio,
Kawakami, Johnson, Johnson, and Howard (1997) predicted that the amount of
gaze directed by interviewees toward black versus white interviewers would be
related to the intervieweesimplicit racial attitudes. As predicted, interviewees who
had displayed more implicit racial bias gazed less at the black than the white inter-
viewer and also blinked more, suggesting greater negative arousal and tension.
However, these nonverbal cues were not related to explicit, and more reactive,
paper-and-pencil reports of prejudice by the interviewees.
PUPIL DILATION AND CONSTRICTION
Researchers currently utilize video-based eye-tracking tools that measure where
people are looking, how long they are looking at something, and how their pupils
respond to what they are looking at and doing, cognitively speaking (Wang, 2011).
Of interest here is how peoples pupils, which, as you know, can dilate and constrict,
might signal their interest level, attitudes, memory, decision-making processes, as
well as various disorders. We will first review the groundbreaking but somewhat
controversial early work in this area before turning to current research trends.
Most of us are aware that the pupils of the eyes constrict in the presence of bright
light and dilate in the absence of light. In the early 1960s, however, Eckhard Hess and
colleagues ushered in a new way of thinking about pupil dilation and constriction by
suggesting that they were possible indicators of interest. In an early experiment, Hess
and Polt (1960) presented five pictures to male and female subjects. Malespupils
dilated more than femalespupils in response to pictures of female nudes; females
pupils dilated more than malesto pictures of a partially clothed muscle man,a
woman with a baby, and a baby alone. Thus, it seemed pupil dilation and interest in
the stimulus were related. In a follow-up study, Hess, Seltzer, and Shlien (1965)
found that the pupils of homosexual males dilated more when viewing pictures of
males than did the pupils of heterosexual males, whose pupils dilated in response to
female pictures. Studies since then have had similar results.
With respect to attitudes, Barlow (1969) preselected subjects who actively sup-
ported either liberal or conservative candidates. He photographed the pupil of the
318 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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right eye of the subjects while they watched slides of political figures and found
what seemed to be a perfect correlation between pupillary response and political
attitudes, with dilation occurring for photographs of liked candidates and constric-
tion occurring for photographs of disliked candidates.
Several of Hesss studies suggested that pupil response might be a bidirectional
index of attitudes: Pupils dilate for positive attitudes and constrict for negative
ones. His oft-cited finding in support of this theory was the constriction of the
pupils of subjects who viewed pictures of concentration camp victims, dead sol-
diers, and a murdered gangster. In Hesss (1975a) words, The changes in emo-
tions and mental activity revealed by changes in pupil size are clearly associated
with changes in attitude.Hess continued to advocate this position, although he
acknowledged the need for more research on the pupils reaction to negative sti-
muli (Hess, 1975b; Hess & Petrovich, 1987).
Woodmansee (1970) tried to improve on Hesss methodology and measuring
instruments and found no support for pupil dilation and constriction as an index of
attitudes toward African Americans. Hays and Plax (1971) found that their subjects
pupils dilated when they received supportive statements, such as I am very much
interested in your speech,but constriction did not follow nonsupportive statements,
such as I disagree completely with the development of your speech.Some research
has found pupil dilation in response to both positive and negative feedback (Janisse
& Peavler, 1974; Partala & Surakka, 2003). Other research has found dilation of
the pupil to be associated with arousal, attentiveness, interest, and perceptual orien-
tation but not to be an attitudinal index. Thus, the intriguing hypothesis that pupils
can be used as bidirectional indicators of attitudes appears not to be viable.
Pupil-size research is difficult to do, in part because many stimuli can cause
variations in pupil size. Tightening muscles anywhere on the body, anticipation of
a loud noise, drugs, eyelid closure, and mental effort all alter pupil size. People
also have varying absolute pupil sizes. Children, for instance, have larger absolute
pupil sizes than adults. With so many sources of variation, it is difficult to state
positively that the dilation is exclusively due to an attitudinal orientation.
Recent research in recognition memory has shown that peoples pupils dilate
more when they are viewing items that they have seen before (i.e., old items as
opposed to new items), and that pupil dilation might reflect the strength of a per-
sons memory for an item (Otero, Weekes, & Hutton, 2011). It appears that this
old-versus-new effect is not something we can consciously control. Heaver and
Hutton (2011) found that participantspupils dilated more to old items than new
items even when they were instructed to feign amnesiaor report all items as
new.This suggests that measures of pupil dilation might be a means of determin-
ing whether a person is pretending to have forgotten things that they really have
not or whether he or she is possibly not consciously aware of something recogniz-
able to him or her at a nonconscious level.
Eye pupils also might signal when we have reached a decision or how we are
processing information about others (Einhäuser, Koch, & Carter, 2010; Goldinger,
He, & Papesh, 2009). Goldinger and colleagues had white and Asian participants
study faces from each others race as well as their own. They noted that partici-
pants made longer but fewer visual fixations, attended to a different set of facial
features, and had more dilated pupils when looking at faces from the other race.
CHAPTER 10 THE EFFECTS OF EYE BEHAVIOR ON HUMAN COMMUNICATION 319
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These findings point to possible differences in effort needed to initially process
faces from another race.
Researchers have begun to examine biomarkers of various clinical disorders,
one of which is pupil dilation. The question is whether the pupils of those who suf-
fer from disorders, such as ASD and depression, react differently to various stimuli
relative to controls (those without the disorder). Martineau and colleagues (2011)
noted that the average pupil size of children with ASD was smaller than that of
control children while viewing slides of neutral faces, avatar faces, and objects,
and Steidtmann, Ingram, and Siegle (2010) found that people with a history of
depression showed greater overall pupil dilation to negatively toned words than
did their nondepressed counterparts. Such findings point to the possible diagnostic
value of eye-tracking methodologies as well as to how pupillary responses might
offer clues to neurologically linked information-processing differences among those
with and without various clinical syndromes.
Another approach to studying pupil size is to investigate its impact on a viewer.
Hess (1975a) cited a study that showed photographs, like those in Figure 10-5, where
a womans pupils were retouched to appear large in one photo and smaller in the
other. Although male subjects did not tend to pick either picture as consistently
more friendly or attractive, they tended to associate positive attributes with the
woman who had larger pupils and negative attributes with the one with smaller
pupils. Hensley (1990) attempted to replicate Hesss work and obtained the
responses of over 500 students to the photographs of models with constricted and
dilated pupils used by Hess. The students evaluated the photos on 22 characteris-
tics, including attractiveness, social skills, persuasiveness, friendliness, and out-
goingness. No statistically significant differences were found between responses to
photos of models with constricted pupils and those with dilated pupils on any of
the 22 characteristics, raising doubts about the strength of Hesss claim.
Recently, several studies have shown that observers are sensitive to pupils of
different sizes, and the impact is especially pronounced in the context of a sad
facial expression. In a study that varied three levels of pupil size, observers saw
more intensity and more negativity when a sad face had smaller pupils (Harrison,
Wilson, & Critchley, 2007).
One study suggested that pupil dilation may be influential in selecting interac-
tion partners or even dates. Stass and Willis (1967) dealt with live subjects rather
than pictures. Subjects were told they would be in an experiment and that they
had to choose a partner who was trustworthy, pleasant, and easy to talk to on an
intimate basis. They were taken to a room where two other individuals waited. The
two people waiting had previously been independently rated as about the same in
general attractiveness. Eye gazing and pupil dilation, through use of a drug, were
varied. Once the naive subject left the waiting room, the experimenter asked
him or her to choose one of the two people and to give reasons for the choice.
Gazing was an overwhelming factor in choice making, but pupil dilation also was a
factor. A few people mentioned visual contact as a reason for their choice, but none
mentioned pupil dilation. Thus, for both women and men, pupil dilation seemed to
be an influential attraction device. Perhaps this would be no revelation to those
women who, in the Middle Ages, put drops of belladonna into their eyes to enlarge
their pupils, or to those expert romancers who suggest a dimly lighted meeting place.
320 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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SUMMARY
Although researchers have examined the size,
color, and position of the eyes, eye rings, eye-
brows, and eyespots in humans and other animals,
our major concern in this chapter was with peo-
plesgazeandmutualgaze.Wesaidthatgazing
serves many interpersonal functions:
1. Regulating the flow of communication, both
to open the channels of communication and
to assist in the turn-taking process.
2. Monitoring feedback.
3. Expressing emotion.
4. Communicating the nature of the interper-
sonal relationship, for example, to show
variations due to status, liking, and disliking.
We also outlined a number of factors that influ-
ence the amount and duration of gaze in human
relationships; for example, distance, physical
FIGURE 10-5
Stimulus photographs with pupils small and large.
IKO/Shutterstock.com
CHAPTER 10 THE EFFECTS OF EYE BEHAVIOR ON HUMAN COMMUNICATION 321
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characteristics, personal and personality charac-
teristics, topics and tasks, and cultural back-
ground. From this review, we would predict
more gazing in the following situations:
You are discussing easy, impersonal topics.
You are interested in your partners reac-
tions and are interpersonally involved.
You like or love your partner.
You are from a culture that emphasizes
visual contact in interaction.
You are an extravert and not shy.
You have high affiliative or inclusion needs.
You are dependent on your partner, and the
partner has been unresponsive.
You are listening rather than talking.
You are female.
You do not have a mental disorder such as
depression, autism, or schizophrenia.
You are not embarrassed, ashamed, sor-
rowful, sad, or trying to hide something.
The preceding list is not exhaustive. Indeed, some
of the findings depend on certain important quali-
fications. For example, you may have less gaze and
less mutual gaze when you are physically close
unless you happen to love your partner and want
to get as close physically and psychologically as
you can. This list is not intended to replace the
qualified principles that appear in the chapter.
The last part of this chapter dealt with pupil
dilation and constriction. We reviewed the find-
ings of Eckhard Hess and others who have pur-
sued his ideas. At this time, pupil dilation has
been associated with arousal, attentiveness, men-
tal effort, interest, and perceptual orientation.
Aside from Hesss own work, however, mixed
support has been found for the idea that pupils
reflect attitudinal states. Dilation occurs under
conditions that seem to represent positive atti-
tudes, but not much support exists for the belief
that constriction of pupils is associated with neg-
ative attitudes.
Answers to Figure 10-2: (a) happy, (b) afraid,
(c) disgusted, (d) distressed, (e) guilty, (f) thought-
ful, (g) flirting, (h) arrogant.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. How do you use gaze in your everyday life?
When are you more likely to gaze at someone
for a long period of time? When are you more
likely to gaze for a very short period of time?
2. Watch yourself in a mirror, and try to convey
the following emotions using only your eyes
and eyebrows: fear, anger, disgust, surprise,
happiness, and sadness. How do your eye
positions and movements change? How sim-
ilar are your expressions to those you see on
other peoples faces every day?
3. Try to recall a time when you had a conver-
sation with someone with a physical disabil-
ity, someone on crutches or in a wheelchair,
for example. Did your gazing patterns
change when interacting with this person as
opposed to interacting with an able-bodied
person? How did your gazing patterns
change?
4. As an experiment, try looking continuously
at the eye region of a person you are
conversing with. Is this difficult? Did the per-
son react to this in any wayfor example, by
reducing gaze, moving back, or commenting?
5. People of higher status are sometimes said to
gaze more and for longer periods than people
of lower status. What do you think of this?
Think of examples that would and would
not be supportive of this theory.
6. Go to a bus or elevator that is crowded and
observe how you, as well as the other people,
use gaze in such a circumstance. How much,
when, where, and at whom do people gaze?
322 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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THE EFFECTS OF VOCAL CUES THAT
ACCOMPANY SPOKEN WORDS
[CHAPTER11]
Ideally, this chapter would not be in written form. Instead, it would be a recording
you could listen to. A recording would give you a greater appreciation of the vocal
nuances that are the subject of this chapteror, as the cliché goes, how something
is said rather than what is said. But the dichotomy set up by this cliché is mislead-
ing because how something is said is frequently what is said.
Some responses to vocal cues are elicited because we deliberately try to manip-
ulate our voice to communicate various meanings. Robert J. McCloskey, spokes-
person for the State Department during the Nixon administration, reportedly
exemplified such behavior:
McCloskey has three distinct ways of saying, I would not speculate: spoken without
accent, it means the department doesnt know for sure; emphasis on the Imeans I
wouldnt, but you mayand with some assurance; accent on speculateindicates
that the questioners premise is probably wrong. (Newsweek, 1970, p. 106)
Most of us do the same kind of thing when we emphasize a particular part of a
message. Prosody is the word used to describe all the variations in the voice that
accompany speech and help to convey its meaning. Notice how different vocal
emphases influence the interpretation of the following message:
1. Hesgiving this money to Herbie. (He is the one giving the money, nobody else.)
2. Hesgiving this money to Herbie. (He is giving, not lending, the money.)
3. Hes giving this money to Herbie. (The money being exchanged is not from
another fund or source; it is this money.)
I understand a fury in your words
But not the words.
Shakespeare, Othello, Act IV
323
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4. Hes giving this money to Herbie. (Money is the unit of exchange, not flowers
or beads.)
5. Hes giving this money to Herbie. (The recipient is Herbie, not Eric or Bill
or Rod.)
We manipulate vocal pitch to indicate the end of a declarative sentence (by lower-
ing it) or a question (by raising it). Sometimes we consciously manipulate our tone
to contradict the verbal message, as in sarcasm. For instance, you can say the
words Im having a wonderful timeso they mean Im having a terrible time.
If you are perceived as being sarcastic, the vocal cues you have given probably
superseded the verbal message.
THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF CHANNELS
The assumption that vocal cues will predominate in forming attitudes based on
contradictory vocal and verbal content prompted Mehrabian and his colleagues to
conduct research on the topic. In one study, listeners heard single words that had
previously been rated as positive, neutral, or negative spoken to them in positive
or negative vocal tones (Mehrabian & Wiener, 1967). This experiment led to the
following conclusion:
The variability of inferences about communicator attitude on the basis of information
available in content and tone combined is mainly contributed by variations in tone
alone. For example, when the attitude communicated in content contradicted the atti-
tude communicated by negative tone, the total message was judged as communicating
negative attitude. (p. 109)
A similar study, pitting vocal cues against facial and verbal cues, found facial cues
to be more influential (Mehrabian & Ferris, 1967). From these studies, Mehrabian
devised the following formula, which illustrates the differential impact or weighting
of verbal, vocal, and facial cues:
Perceivedattitudeofcommunicator ¼:07ðverbalÞþ:38ðvocalÞþ:55ðfacialÞ
Obviously the formula is limited by the design of Mehrabians experiments. For
instance, we do not know how the formula might change if some of the variables
were manipulated more vigorously, or if more or different people did the judging.
We do not know whether the formula would apply to verbal materials longer than
one word. And we do not know whether these respondents were reacting to the
inconsistency itself as a source of attitudinal information (see Lapakko, 1997, for
a critique). The fact that respondents resolved inconsistencies by relying on nonver-
bal cues does not mean evaluative information is conveyed by nonverbal cues
alone, or even mainly, in more realistic communication. In realistic settings, more-
over, we would expect that the message(s) conveyed by vocal cues would align
with that being communicated by facial cues and words more often than not. The
relative importance of vocal cues is likely to vary according to a number of factors,
such as the nature of the message, age of the decoder, the nature of the decoding
task, as well as various combinations of these three. Friedman (1979) found that
for some kinds of messages, words mattered more than the facial expressions.
Others have suggested that bodily action cues, such as facial expressions, posture,
324 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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and hand gestures, send a stronger message of frustration during arguments than
does the combination of verbal and nonverbal cues of frustration (e.g., pitch) (Yu,
2011). Still others have shown that, although words alone, prosody alone, and the
two combined can help people make decisions about whether a face is happy, sad,
or grimacing, one method is not necessarily better than the others (Pell, Jaywat,
Monetta, & Kotz, 2011).
The preference to base interpretations on words versus vocal cues changes with
age: Young children rely much more on verbal content, older children show a
mixed pattern, and adults rely much more on nonverbal tonal qualities (Bugental,
Kaswan, & Love, 1970; Morton & Trehub, 2001). However, even within a partic-
ular age, some emotional messages might be recognized better than others in the
vocal channel. For instance, preschoolers appear to recognize sadness in the voice
alone better than the emotions of happiness, fear, and anger. The nature of the
decoding task also needs to be taken into consideration. Paulmann and Pell (2011)
had participants make emotion judgments when only one cue was available (face
shown on a computer, voice heard over headphones, or text on a computer screen),
two cues (face and prosodic cues or prosodic cues with words) were available, or
all three were available. They noted that, in terms of identifying emotion states,
having access to more emotionally congruent cues was more helpful than just hav-
ing one. However, this research also showed that, if only one cue was available, the
visual cues from the face or text tended to be more informative than the prosodic
cues. In another study, Paulmann, Titone, and Pell (2012) had participants select
facial expressions that matched their task instructions (click on the happy face).
They found that participants looked longer at facial expressions that matched their
task instructions irrespective of whether the available prosodic cues matched or did
not match the emotion on the face that they were told to identify. This suggests
that semantic information may exert a more powerful influence than prosodic cues
on such tasks.
When viewers are asked to guess the thoughts and feelings of people shown on
videotape engaged in natural conversation, their accuracy is based far more on the
words that are spoken than on the nonverbal cues they see or hear (i.e., vocal cues)
(Gesn & Ickes, 1999; Hall & Schmid Mast, 2007). However, nonverbal cues did
contribute to accuracy, especially when the viewers were asked to focus on the tar-
get personsfeelings. Nowadays, with text messaging and email, people rely a great
deal on communication via words alone, and it is reasonable to ask what might be
missed in such a medium. Kruger, Epley, Parker, and Ng (2005) found that when
affective messages were conveyed through email, they were much less accurately
decoded than when the same messages were conveyed in voice-to-voice and face-
to-face conditions. Furthermore, adding facial cues did not improve accuracy
beyond the voice-only condition. In this instance, vocal cues were crucial to fully
conveying attitudinal intent. Above and beyond issues of accuracy, prosodic cues in
face-to-face interactions offer a means of emotional support that emails and text
messages cannot provide. Seltzer, Prososki, Ziegler, and Pollak (2012) found that
girls who sent text messages to their mothers after undergoing a stressful experi-
ence had cortisol levelswhich is one marker of a persons current stress level
similar to children who did not interact with a parent at all, whereas those who
had either interacted with their mothers on the phone or in person (thus having
CHAPTER 11 THE EFFECTS OF VOCAL CUES THAT ACCOMPANY SPOKEN WORDS 325
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access to prosodic cues from their mothersvoice) showed increases in oxytocin,
which is thought to be linked to the experience of positive relationships with
others. In short, vocal cues were important in helping these girls cope with the
stress, whereas text messages were not.
Studies comparing impressions made by the voice to those made by the face
have found the voice especially suited to conveying degrees of dominance or potency.
The face has a greater impact on judgments of pleasantness or positivity (Zuckerman,
Amidon, Biship, & Pomerantz, 1982; Zuckerman & Driver, 1989) and is a more
effective channel than the voice by which to judge peoples rapport (Grahe &
Bernieri, 1999). Vocal clues to dominance include speed, tendency to interrupt, and
loudness; the most obvious clue to pleasantness in the face is a smile. However,
each modality can convey a wealth of other messages through more subtle varia-
tions. For example, the presence of a smile can be evident in the voice alone; in smil-
ing, the vocal tract is shortened, with the effect of raising the resonances (Scherer,
1986). Some actors who do voice-overs on television advertisements are skilled in
conveying a cheerful attitude through their voice quality alone.
Thus, even though the impact of the voice relative to other channels of com-
munication may vary according to many factors, there is no doubt that vocal cues
exert a great deal of influence on listener perceptions. Often these responses are
based on stereotypes associated with various vocal qualities. Not surprisingly, the
existence of such stereotypes means that some vocal qualities are preferred over
others. Zuckerman and Driver (1989) documented that listeners generally agree on
whether a voice is attractive or not, and also that people whose voices are consid-
ered more attractive are believed to have personality traits such as dominance,
competence, industriousness, sensitivity, and warmth. Other stereotypes relating to
the voice will be described later in this chapter.
THE INGREDIENTS AND METHODS OF STUDYING PARALANGUAGE
The physical mechanisms for producing nonverbal vocal qualities and sounds, also
called paralanguage, are extremely complex (Juslin & Scherer, 2005). Figure 11-1
illustrates the many muscles and other structures involved in producing vocal
sounds; these include the throat, nasal cavities, tongue, lips, mouth, and jaw. In
this chapter, however, we focus on the impact of paralanguage rather than the
mechanisms by which it is produced. Many techniques and methods have been
developed for studying the role of vocal nonverbal cues in the communication pro-
cess (Scherer, 2003). We provide just a short introduction here.
In one approach to studying nonverbal vocal communication, listeners are asked
for their impressions or inferences about a voice sample, for example, how anxious
or competent the voice sounds. Using this method, a researcher may gain insight
into the social meanings of vocal cues because listenersimpressions are based on
their store of experience, knowledge, and beliefs. However, a researcher learns little
about what specific vocal cues created a given impression because listeners are inter-
preting the vocal cues in an implicit way to reach a final impression. A listener may
know an angry voice when he or she hears one, but may not be able to pinpoint the
acoustic properties that made it sound angry. (Whether their impressions are correct
is a separate issue from the question of how the impressions are formed.)
326 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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FIGURE 11-1
Muscles and structures involved in speech and paralanguage.
Source: From Fernando Poyatos, Paralanguage: A Linguistic Approach to Interactive Speech and Sound, 1993, p. 49.
With kind permission by John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia. www.benjamins.com.
CHAPTER 11 THE EFFECTS OF VOCAL CUES THAT ACCOMPANY SPOKEN WORDS 327
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In contrast, sometimes researchers want, and need, to measure specific vocal
characteristics, also called acoustic properties, and for this they use automated
devices or trained coders. Voice researchers use automated measurement by com-
puters much more than do researchers who study nonvocal modalities of communi-
cation, in part because the technology exists for doing so. Commonly measured
acoustic properties include the following: speech rate, or words per unit of time;
fundamental frequency (F
0
), which is the vibration rate of the vocal folds in the
throat and the main contributor, along with the harmonics and resonances thus
produced, to the perception of pitch; and intensity, which is the energy value for a
speech sound, perceived as loudness. Each of these can be measured as an average
value over an utterance or over some other unit of time, or they can be described
more dynamically in terms of range, variation, and contour (Scherer, 1986).
It is also possible to assess vocal nonverbal behavior at a level between these
impressionistic and purely descriptive extremes. A listener might be asked to char-
acterize a voice as whiny, breathy, or abrupt but not to go to the next level of sub-
jectivity by inferring a trait or mood. For instance, from the three adjectives just
named, a listener might infer that the speaker is weak, sexy, or rude, respectively.
You can see that the last three descriptions are further removed from the actual
vocal cues and more inferential than the first three. Studying perceptions at this
midway point is a crucial link in understanding the relationship between acoustic
features of voices and their social impact (Scherer, 1982).
The fact that the voice has acoustic features perceived and interpreted by a lis-
tener according to his or her knowledge, stereotypes, and other cognitions is part
of what is called the lens model of nonverbal judgment (Scherer, 2003). According
to this model, a full understanding of vocal and other nonverbal phenomena must
acknowledge a series of interlocking steps: A persons state or trait (A) is reflected
in acoustic behavior (B), which is perceived by a listener (C), who forms an impres-
sion or attribution (D), which may then be the basis for behavioral reaction or
change in the listener (E). Studies hardly ever include all of these elements. One
study might document how a speakers emotional state is reflected in acoustic
changes (AB), whereas another might relate acoustic properties of the voice to lis-
tenersimpressions of personality (BD), and so forth.
Researchers are also interested in the development of skill in using acoustic
cues as well as in disturbances to this ability. To this end, experiments are conducted
with infants and children to understand if or when they can use prosodic cues in
the processing of language (Berman, Chambers, & Graham, 2010; Sakkalou &
Gattis, 2012). Also, children and adults who suffer from specific disorders, such as
Williams syndrome (where there are deficits in the production and comprehension
of prosody), are compared to typically developing children in an effort to isolate
the neurologic mechanisms that might contribute to their underlying problem in
processing emotional cues from language (Pinheiro et al., 2011).
All approaches for measuring vocal behavior have strengths and weaknesses.
The choice depends on the questions being asked in the particular study. Hall,
Roter, and Rand (1981), for example, were interested in the impact of physicians
and patientscommunication of emotion during medical visits. Accordingly, they
asked listeners to rate the emotions conveyed in content-masked audiotapes of doc-
tors and patients talking during medical office visits. (Content masking obscures
328 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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THE SOUNDS OF ILLNESS
You undoubtedly have heard
the hoarse or whisper-like
speaking voice of a friend
and realized that he or she
had laryngitis, a physical
condition in which swollen
vocal cords affect the sound
we hear from people. Clini-
cians, such as psychologists
and psychiatrists, also listen
to the speech of others, but
generally for the purpose of
identifying possible clues to
disturbances of the mind.
They rely on the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (DSM-IV)
to diagnose various psycholo-
gical disorders. The DSM-IV
lists the features associated
with each mental disorder,
and speech is sometimes one
of many different features
mentioned. The following are
examples of speech cues that
are linked to various disorders
in the DSM-IV and research:
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity: Talking
excessively, loud voice.
Schizophrenia: Disorganized speech,
flat voice, poor vocal emotion
expression.
Manic episode: Pressured speech.
Depression: Slow speech, long pauses.
Major depression with catatonic
features: Echolalia (the person repeats
words or phrases that others have just
spoken).
Histrionic personality disorder: Speech
is excessively impressionistic and lacking
in detail.
Eduardo Jose Bernardino/Photos.com
Catalin Petolea/Photos.com
CHAPTER 11 THE EFFECTS OF VOCAL CUES THAT ACCOMPANY SPOKEN WORDS 329
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deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
the verbal information while retaining nonverbal vocal properties, as explained in
Chapter 3 and later in this chapter.) They found that if the physician sounded
angry, anxious, or contented, the patient did also, and vice versa; in other
words, there was a reciprocation of expressed feelings. In that study, gathering
judgesimpressions made more sense than measuring acoustic properties, such as
fundamental frequency or loudness, because the interest was in social impact, not
the specific cues. But another researcher might focus on uncovering the relation-
ship between the descriptive and impressionistic levels, that is, finding out what
increased fundamental frequency, intensity, and so forth, mean in terms of listen-
ersperceptions. For example, a voice tone we would label as breathyis produced
by narrowing the glottis a little while letting through more air than is the case for a
normal voice and making the vocal folds vibrate without fully closing (Poyatos,
1993). Researchers studying vocal communication of emotion have been particularly
active in trying to uncover what cues are used to convey different emotions.
The voice is capable of a great variety of sounds (Poyatos, 1993; Trager,
1958). The components most closely tied to speech include the three already men-
tionedfrequency, intensity, and speedas well as vocal lip control, ranging from
sharp to smooth transitions; articulation control, either forceful or relaxed; rhythm
control, varying from smooth to jerky; and resonance, describing voice ranges from
resonant to thin.Other nonverbal vocal behaviors are less tied to speech and
may even substitute for speech. These include laughing, crying, whispering, snor-
ing, yelling, moaning, yawning, whining, sighing, and belching, along with the
common uh,”“um,”“mmm,”“uh-huh,and other such sounds, some of which
merge with our definitions of linguistic behavior. Also included as paralanguage
are nonsounds, such as pauses between words or phrases within one persons
speech and pauses when a new speaker begins, also called a switching pause or
speech latency. Some related phenomena, which Mahl and Schulze (1964) placed
under the broad heading of extralinguistic phenomena, are also relevant to any dis-
cussion of communication and vocal behavior. These include dialect or accent,
nonfluencies, duration of utterance, and interaction rates.
Now that we have a sense of the ingredients of paralanguage, we can ask the
next logical question: What reactions do vocal cues elicit, and how are they impor-
tant in communicating?
VOCAL CUES AND SPEAKER RECOGNITION
You may have had this experience: You pick up the phone and say, Hello.The
voice on the other end says, Hi, how ya doin?At this point you realize two
things: (1) The greeting suggests an informality found among people who are sup-
posed to know each other, and (2) you dont know who it is! So you try to extend
the conversation without admitting your ignorance, hoping some verbal cue will be
given, or that you eventually will recognize the callers voice. As a result, you say
something like, Fine. What have you been up to?Speaker recognition is impor-
tant not only to all of us in everyday life but also to law enforcement officials and
governments. Joseph Stalin assigned teams of imprisoned scientists and engineers
to develop speaker-recognition technology so Stalins police could easily identify
enemies of the state(Hollien, 1990).
330 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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Each time you speak, you produce a complex acoustic signal. It is not exactly
the same each time you speak, even if it is the same word, nor is the acoustic signal
you produce exactly the same as the one produced by other speakers. The proba-
bility that greater differences will exist between the voices of two different speakers
than the voice of a single speaker at two different times has led to considerable
interest in the process of identifying speakers by their voices alone. There are three
primary methods for identifying speakers from the voice:
1. Listening
2. Visual comparison of spectrograms (voiceprints)
3. Recognition by computers that compare the acoustic patterns of a standard
spoken message to stored versions of the same message previously spoken by
the same speaker
Although machines are credited with many accomplishments in todays society,
ordinary human listening compares favorably with the other two techniques for
accuracy in most speaker-recognition tasks. Under certain circumstances, human
beings can recognize speakers with a high degree of accuracy. In one study, a single
sentence was enough to identify 8 to 10 work colleagues at more than 97 percent
accuracy (van Lancker, Kreiman, & Emmorey, 1985). In another study, 83 percent
accuracy for 29 familiar speakers was achieved (Ladefoged & Ladefoged, 1980). It
appears that listeners can use numerous acoustic cues to identify a speaker, but it is
not clear which ones reliably distinguish one speaker from another, as some cues,
such as speaking rate, are important to the recognition of some voices but not
others (Creel & Bregman, 2011; Van Lancker, Kreiman, & Wickens, 1985). More-
over, even when listeners accurately identify a speaker from his or her voice, they
are probably not able to explain the perceptual bases for their decision. Law
enforcement and judicial agencies have a special concern for identifying speakers
objectively from their vocal characteristics. At the famous trial of Bruno
Hauptmann, the kidnapper of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindberghs baby,
Charles Lindbergh claimed he recognized Hauptmanns voice as the voice of the
kidnapper, even though it had been about 3 years since he had heard it. Skeptical
about the accuracy of this identification, McGehee (1937) conducted research that
found accuracy tends to drop sharply after 3 weeks, and after 5 months, it dips to
about 13 percent. Subsequent research has also found reductions in accuracy over
time, but often not as dramatic as those McGehee found. Accuracy of identification
by listeners also falls notably as the speech samples are made shorter; when various
distortions or distractions occursuch as more speakers, disguised voices, whisper-
ing, and dialects; and when the target voice is paired with another that sounds sim-
ilar to it (Hollien, 1990; Kerstholt, Jansen, van Amelsvoort, & Broeders, 2006).
And, of course, accuracy varies with how many times one has heard the voice in
question.
Many factors affect listening accuracy, but similar problems plague efforts to
devise more objectivemethods of speaker recognitionnot the least of which is
the knowledge that no single set of acoustic cues reliably distinguishes speakers.
One effort to find a more objective method of speaker identification involves
the spectrogram, also called a voiceprint, which is a visual picture of a persons
speech. A spectrogram is a plot of vocal energy in different frequency bands as a
CHAPTER 11 THE EFFECTS OF VOCAL CUES THAT ACCOMPANY SPOKEN WORDS 331
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function of time. Although some have made strong claims for the accuracy and reli-
ability of spectrographic analysis, it seems to be quite fallible (Bolt et al., 1973).
Errors in human judgment occur as interpretations of the visual data are made.
The interpreters skill becomes particularly relevant when we look at Figure 11-2.
These two similar spectrograms of two different people uttering a single word
make it sufficiently clear that we must weigh our reliance on spectrograms as evi-
dence at trials very carefully (Hollien, 1990). Spectrograms are not like finger-
prints. True, no two voices are exactly alike, but depending on the voice sample
obtained and the equipment used, two different voices may appear very similar. In
contrast, fingerprints, unlike voices, show little variability from one measurement
to the next, unless, of course, smudges or smears have occurred. One study asked
speakers to produce the same sentence using their normal voice and a number of
disguises”—speaking like an old person, using a hypernasal voice, a hoarse voice,
a slow rate of speech, and a disguise of the speakers own choosing. These voice
samples were then submitted to spectrographic analysis by experts who were paid
$50 if they achieved the highest accuracy of identification. Normal voices were
matched with about 57 percent accuracy, but all the disguises significantly inter-
fered with identification. The least accuracy was achieved when speakers chose
their own type of disguise (Reich, Moll, & Curtis, 1976). Hollien (1990) concluded
that spectrographic recognition is a still unvalidated methodology.
FIGURE 11-2
Similar spectrograms of the word youuttered by two arbitrarily selected speakers.
Source: Hollien, H. (1990). The acoustics of crime: The new science of forensic phonetics. New York: Plenum.
Reprinted with kind permission from Springer Science and Business Media.
332 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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VOCAL CUES AND PERSONALITY
One cultural syndrome that aptly illustrates our association of vocal cues with cer-
tain personality characteristics concerns the low, deep voice associated with men
and masculinity. Salespeople, radio and television announcers, lawyers, and many
others try to emulate low vocal tones, which they perceive as being more sophisti-
cated, appealing, sexy, or masculine than higher-pitched voices.
Numerous research efforts have tried to determine whether certain personality
traits are actually expressed in the voice and whether listeners are sensitive to
these cues. It is common to find the following:
1. High agreement among judges of the voices regarding the presence of certain
personality characteristics
2. Inconsistent agreement between the judgespersonality perceptions and the
speakers actual score on personality tests
3. A very high correspondence between the judgesperceptions and actual crite-
rion measures for some voices and some personality traits
We can make several points about these findings. First, the criterion measures
personality testsare also frequently imperfect measures, meaning there might be
a higher correspondence than the data seem to indicate. Furthermore, research has
often ignored differences among listeners with respect to personality, culture, and
developmental traits, which may profoundly impact the listeners accuracy in per-
ceiving personality traits based on vocal cues. Research also suggests that a given
personality trait may not be expressed similarly in the voices of people from differ-
ent cultures.
The finding that listeners cannot always detect personality from vocal cues
does not mean the voice does not contain any cues to personality. There are several
lines of positive evidence on this issue. Extraversion/introversion is the trait dimen-
sion best documented in vocal cues of American speakers. Cues associated with a
speakers actual, not just perceived, extraversion, when compared to introversion,
are more fluencythat is, shorter pauses when the speaking turn switches from
one speaker to another, shorter silent pauses within a persons speech, and fewer
hesitationsfaster rate, louder speech, more dynamic contrast, higher pitch (up to
a point), and more variable pitch. In addition, extraverted people have been
shown to talk more, in both number of words and total speaking time (Lippa,
1998; Siegman, 1987). However, other research has shown that self-reported mea-
sures that tap into extraversion are not related to a persons talkativeness (Wardle,
Cedarbaum, & de Wit, 2010). Nevertheless, in light of some of the robust vocal
manifestations of extraversion, it is not surprising that people use vocal cues
such as loudness, fullness, and enunciation as a basis for judging extraversion
(Lippa, 1998).
Lippa (1998) also inquired about several dimensions of masculinity and femi-
ninity relative to vocal qualities, defining the masculinityfemininity dimensions in
terms of the participantsgender-typical preferences for occupations, hobbies, and
other activities. Among men, those who were more masculine by this definition
had poorer enunciation and less expressive, lower-pitched, slower, and louder
voices; among women, there was a correlation only for voice pitchmore
CHAPTER 11 THE EFFECTS OF VOCAL CUES THAT ACCOMPANY SPOKEN WORDS 333
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deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
masculine women had lower-pitched voices. Listenersperceptions partially
matched these associations, with higher ratings of masculinity being given to tar-
gets whose voices were less expressive and lower pitched.
The trait of dominance also has been documented to have an associated speech
style, and some of its elements overlap with those found for extraversion. Indivi-
duals who speak louder are perceived as more dominant (Harrigan, Gramata,
Luck, & Margolis, 1989; Tusing & Dillard, 2000), and indeed more dominant
individuals do tend to have voices that are louder than those of less dominant indi-
viduals (Hall, Coats, & Smith LeBeau, 2005; Siegman, 1987; Weaver & Anderson,
1973). Also, compared to women with higher voices, women with lower voices are
perceived as more dominant by men and women alike (Borkowska & Pawlowski,
2011). Because the stereotype and the actual behavior associated with dominance
coincide, it is not surprising that Berry (1991a) found that listeners were accurate
in judging the personality trait of assertiveness in voices recorded while expressors
recited the alphabet.
How personality is actually expressed in speech may be complex, but there is
no dearth of evidence that people believe speech contains clues to personality.
Addington (1968) conducted one of the most complete studies in this area. Male
and female speakers simulated nine vocal characteristics, and judges responded to
the voices by rating them on 40 personality characteristics. Judges were most reli-
able, meaning they agreed most with each other, in ratings of masculinefeminine,
youngold, enthusiasticapathetic, energeticlazy, and attractiveugly. Addington
concluded that the male personality generally was perceived in terms of physical
and emotional power, whereas the female personality was apparently perceived in
terms of social faculties. Table 11-1 summarizes his results.
Addington posed some interesting questions for researchers studying vocal cues
and personality. To what extent are these stereotyped impressions of personality
maintained in the face of conflicting personality information? And what is the rela-
tionship between a given personality impression and vocal cues? For example,
Addingtons research indicated that increased pitch variety led to more positive per-
sonality impressions, but is it not possible that at some point, increasing pitch vari-
ety could become so exaggerated as to evoke negative perceptions? Zuckermans
research on vocal attractiveness suggests this may be so, because extremes of
pitch, pitch range, shrillness, and squeakiness produced more negative impressions.
Another question is the accuracy of some stereotypes. Consider the following.
Do gay males show vocal characteristics that are more similar to heterosexual
females than heterosexual males? In stereotype, gay men possess effeminate quali-
ties, including the pitch of their voice. Indeed, there is evidence that male actors
use a higher voice pitch when portraying a gay character (Cartei & Reby, 2012).
However, a study of actual pitch characteristics of gay men as well as heterosexual
men and women revealed that, although gay men do use a higher pitch than het-
erosexual men, it is significantly lower than that of the typical heterosexual female
(Baeck, Corthals, & Van Borsel, 2011). Thus, there is no evidence that gay mens
voice pitch usually matches that of heterosexual females.
People with more attractive voices are, in general, rated as having better
personalities than people with less attractive voices, and are perceived as less neu-
rotic, more extraverted, and more open, warm, agreeable, powerful, honest, and
334 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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conscientious (Berry, 1992; Zuckerman, Hodgins, & Miyake, 1990; Zuckerman &
Miyake, 1993). People with more attractive voices, as judged by independent listen-
ers, are sexually active earlier, and have more partners, than those with less attrac-
tive voices. And, within each sex, those with more stereotypically desirable
physiquesthat is, those with higher shoulder-to-waist ratios for men and lower
waist-to-hip ratios for womenalso tend to have more attractive voices (Hughes,
Dispenza, & Gallup, 2004).
Zuckermans research, as well as that of others (Bloom, Moore-Schoenmakers,
& Masataka, 1999; Bloom, Zajac, & Titus, 1999; Riding, Lonsdale, & Brown,
2006), also uncovered the particular speech qualities that produced higher ratings
of vocal attractiveness. More attractive-rated voices were more resonant, less
monotonous, less nasal, even in infants; and for adult male voices, lower in pitch.
TABLE 11-1 SIMULATED VOCAL CUES AND PERSONALITY STEREOTYPES
Simulated
Vocal Cue Speakers Stereotyped Perceptions
Breathiness Males Younger, more artistic
Females More feminine, prettier, more petite, effervescent,
high-strung, shallower
Thinness Males Did not alter the listeners image of the speaker, no
significant correlations
Females Increased social, physical, emotional, and mental
immaturity; increased sense of humor and
sensitivity
Flatness Males More masculine, more sluggish, colder, more
withdrawn
Females More masculine, more sluggish, colder, more
withdrawn
Nasality Males A wide array of socially undesirable characteristics
Females A wide array of socially undesirable characteristics
Tenseness Males Older, more unyielding, cantankerous
Females Younger; more emotional, feminine, high-strung;
less intelligent
Throatiness Males Older, more realistic, mature, sophisticated, well
adjusted
Females Less intelligent; more masculine; lazier; more
boorish, unemotional, ugly, sickly, careless,
inartistic, naive, humble, neurotic, quiet,
uninteresting, apathetic
Increased rate Males More animated and extraverted
Females More animated and extraverted
Increased pitch Males More dynamic, feminine, esthetically inclined
Variety Females More dynamic and extraverted
CHAPTER 11 THE EFFECTS OF VOCAL CUES THAT ACCOMPANY SPOKEN WORDS 335
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Personality stereotypes also exist about people with babyish voices. Both
adults and young children with more babyish voices are perceived as more warm
and honest but less powerful and competent than people with more mature-
sounding voices. It seems the general qualities attributed to children are attributed
to people with younger-sounding voices no matter what their actual age (Berry,
1992; Berry, Hansen, Landry-Pester, & Meier, 1994). This might explain why,
although a higher pitch in the female voice is perceived as attractive, too high of
a pitch is not, as this could be a vocal cue of sexual immaturity (Borkowska &
Pawlowski, 2011).
VOCAL CUES AND GROUP PERCEPTIONS
A related line of study involves associating various characteristics with voices rep-
resentative of groups of people. The study of dialects and accents is illustrative. In
George Bernard ShawsplayPygmalion, and its musical adaptation My Fair
Lady, Eliza Doolittle spent considerable time and effort trying to correct her dia-
lect so she could rise in social standing. Professor Higgins says, Look at hera
prisner of the gutters; Condemned by evry syllable she utters(My Fair Lady,
Act I, Scene 1). Elizas training, according to one study, was most appropriate. It
suggests that if we expect a speaker to reflect a nonstandard or lower-classdia-
lect, and the speaker actually presents himself or herself in accordance with stan-
dard or upper-classmodels, the evaluation will be very positive. The reverse
also was true: Speakers who were expected to speak upbut who spoke
downinstead were evaluated negatively (Aboud, Clement, & Taylor, 1974).
Sometimes, though, there may be a fine line between adapting to our audience
and violating expectations based on our own background. If an audience thinks
we are faking something or concealing who we really are,they could judge us
harshly.
Although there are some exceptions, ordinarily dialects other than the one spo-
ken by the listener/evaluator receive less favorable evaluations than those consid-
ered standard. Generally, these negative responses occur because the listener
associates the speakers dialect with an ethnic or regional stereotype and then eval-
uates the voice in accordance with the stereotype.
Do regional varieties of speech in the United States differ in prestige value?
Listeners in Maine, Louisiana, New York City, Arkansas, and Michigan rated
12 voice samples of American dialects and one foreign accent (Wilke & Snyder,
1941). The most unfavorably regarded was the foreign accent and so-called
New Yorkese. Although this study is quite old, the New York Times recently
(November, 2010) had a story about how some New Yorkers seek professional
help (speech therapists) in order to reduce their New York accent. They seek help
because they are concerned that their accent is viewed negatively by outsiders and
might limit their ability to land jobs (e.g., acting) that have audiences expecting to
hear Standard American English. Several investigators have pursued the question of
exactly how we judge the speech and dialects of others. By far the most extensive
work in this direction was done by Mulac (1976). Mulacs experiments have used
regional and foreign dialects, broadcasters, various speech pathologies, prose and
spontaneous speech, and different modes of presentation such as written format,
336 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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audiotape, videotape, and sound film. This work shows we tend to respond to
samples of speech along three primary dimensions:
1. Sociointellectual status, that is, high or low social status, blue or white collar,
rich or poor, and literate or illiterate
2. Aesthetic quality, that is, pleasing or displeasing, nice or awful, sweet or sour,
beautiful or ugly
3. Dynamism, that is, aggressive or unaggressive, active or passive, strong or
weak, loud or soft
These results confirm studies in many other areas of perception that show we tend
to see our world and the things in it according to power, evaluation, and activity
dimensions.
VOCAL CUES AND JUDGMENTS OF SOCIODEMOGRAPHIC
CHARACTERISTICS
The study of vocal cues about the sociodemographic characteristics of a speaker
might focus on the judgment process itself or the accuracy of the judgments. In
terms of the judgment process, researchers have examined how we recognize cues
to a persons dialect from spoken words as well as the phonological markers of
regional difference in accent (Aubanel & Nguyen, 2010; Scharinger, Monahan, &
Idsardi, 2011). In terms of judgment accuracy, Pear (1931) did pioneering work
on vocal cues and judgments of personal characteristics. Using nine speakers and
over 4,000 radio listeners, he found a speakers age could be estimated fairly accu-
rately, the speakers sex with remarkable accuracy, birthplace with little accuracy,
and occasionally vocation with surprising accuracy. The actor and clergy were con-
sistently identified from among the nine professionals represented. Since that
time, others have been interested in judgments of such characteristics as body type,
height, weight, age, occupation, status or social class, race, sex, education, accents,
and dialect region. For instance, Krauss, Freyberg, and Morsella (2002) found that
a persons photograph could be matched with his or her voice with significant
accuracy by naive participants.
There are three characteristics that are judged accurately and with some consis-
tency from vocal cues, namely, a persons sex, age, and social class or status. These
will be discussed in detail next.
SEX
Listeners who heard six recorded vowels of 20 speakers were able to identify the
sex of the speaker 96 percent of the time when the tape was not altered in any
way. Accuracy decreased to 91 percent for a filtered tape and to 75 percent for a
whispered voice sample (Lass, Hughes, Bowyer, Waters, & Broune, 1976). These
authors argued that the fundamental frequency is a more important acoustic cue
in speaker gender identification than the resonance characteristics of the voices. It
is certainly the case that women typically speak with a higher fundamental fre-
quency, perceived as higher pitch, than men (Ko, Judd, & Blair, 2006; Viscovich
et al., 2003). Womens voices are also more variable or expressive but less resonant
CHAPTER 11 THE EFFECTS OF VOCAL CUES THAT ACCOMPANY SPOKEN WORDS 337
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than mens. Not surprisingly, these same features are used within gender when lis-
teners make ratings of how feminine or masculine a voice sounds (Ko et al., 2006).
Social factors can, of course, qualify sex differences. For instance, males and
females interacting with each other may manifest different vocal cues than when
they present monologues or interact with a member of the same sex (Markel,
Prebor, & Brandt, 1972). The topic of discussion also may affect voice production
and perceptions. And if differences gradually narrow as adaptations to the social
community are made, we might speculate that the vocal tones of working women
in predominantly male organizations may be harder to distinguishparticularly if
the sample is taken in the work milieu.
At the borderline between verbal and nonverbal behavior falls an area of
study concerned with speech styles, or speech registers. A speech register refers
to a total way of communicating through speech, which can include both nonver-
bal and verbal forms, and it is believed to vary systematically with social charac-
teristics of the speakers, for example, how socially powerful a person is (Erickson,
Lind, Johnson, & OBarr, 1978). This research is pertinent to our discussion of
speaker gender because it has been suggested that certain verbal forms associated
with power differentiate the speech styles of men versus women (Lakoff, 1975).
Examples of less powerful speech stereotypically associated with females include
tag questions (Its a nice day, isntit?), hedges and qualifiers (sort of,
maybe), disclaimers (Idont know, but), and intensifiers (The puppy was
so cute). Leaper and Robnett (2011), in a review of the research, concluded
that women did speak somewhat more tentatively than men, but this was not
due to womens taking a submissive role in conversation. Rather, they concluded
that using more tentative speech is an aspect of womens greater interpersonal
sensitivity (see Chapter 3).
Interruptions, another interactional strategy that can reflect dominance, also
have been hypothesized to differentiate between men and women in the direction
we might expect based on stereotype. People certainly do have well-developed
stereotypes about how men and women speak, but the evidence supporting the
hypothesis of gender differences in language use and interruptions is extremely
mixed (Aries, 1987; Dindia, 1987; Hirschman, 1994; Irish & Hall, 1995; Kramer,
1978; Marche & Peterson, 1993; Mulac, Lundell, & Bradac, 1986; Nohara, 1992;
Turner, Dindia, & Pearson, 1995). The fact that interruptions can signify enthusi-
astic, active participation in a conversation, rather than efforts to attain or express
dominance, is probably one reason why studies are mixed as to which gender inter-
rupts more; whereas early studies tended to find that men interrupted more, more
recent studies often find no difference, and some find that women interrupt more
than men.
Because interruptions can mean very different things, discussing them without
drawing functional distinctions can be very misleading. For example, in a study of
married and cohabiting couples by Daigen and Holmes (2000), the total number of
interruptions in the couplesconversations, as measured in a laboratory interaction,
was not related to marital satisfaction. But interruptions that conveyed disagreement
and disparagement of the others message did predict lower satisfaction, both at the
time and 2 years laterespecially when the latter kind of interruption was directed
from the man to the woman. Further evidence that the impact of interruptions
338 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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might differ between men and women comes from Farleys (2008) study showing
that, in general, speakers who interrupted often were less liked by listeners than
speakers who did not interrupt, but that this effect was especially pronounced when
the interrupter was a woman.
AGE
As we mentioned, studies show age to be fairly accurately assessed from vocal cues.
In a recent study, age was judged quite accurately from the voice, and not much
less so than when judgments were made from a full-length photograph (Krauss
et al., 2002). Research sheds light on what kinds of cues are likely relevant to judg-
ing age from the voice. With advancing age, speech slows down, and dysfluencies
and perturbations in fundamental frequency increase (Hummert, Mazloff, &
Henry, 1999). Several studies have investigated voice pitch of males during infancy,
childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, and middle and advanced age. There is a
general lowering of pitch level from infancy through middle age, with some studies
finding a reversal, such that pitch level rises slightly with advancing age. Changes
in pitch flexibility, tremor, speech rate, loudness, vocal quality, articulatory control,
and the like, may give clues to age. It is likely that we rely on a host of these cues as
opposed to only one when judging a voice to be that of an old person (Harnsberger,
Brown, Shrivastav, & Rothman, 2010).
SOCIAL CLASS OR STATUS
Several studies show listeners to be amazingly accurate in judging social class or
status on the basis of voice alone. Harms (1961) used a standard system to deter-
mine social class for nine speakers. Each speaker recorded a 40- to 60-second con-
versation in which he responded to questions and statements such as How are
you?and Ask for the time.Results show that listeners were not only able to
identify the speakersstatus; many of them said they made their decision after only
10 to 15 seconds of listening to the recording.
CHARACTERISTICS OF RECIPIENTS
So far we have been discussing ways in which a speakers personal characteristics
are reflected in his or her nonverbal speech style. But it would be very surprising if
a persons speech style did not also reflect characteristics of the other person in an
interaction. After all, we react to different kinds of people with many emotions and
thoughts that may be reflected in our vocal expression, and we also have notions
about how we ought to talk to different kinds of people.
A well-studied example of such a target effectis baby talk, also called
motherese, which is the high-pitched, singsong, slow, rhythmic, repetitive, simpli-
fied way that parents around the worldfathers as well as motherstalk to
young children (Grieser & Kuhl, 1988; Snow & Ferguson, 1977; Trainor, Austin,
& Desjardins, 2000). Even young children know how to talk this way to babies
and pets. Zebrowitz, Brownlow, and Olson (1992) found that the facial character-
istics of children influenced how much baby talk they received from adults; those
CHAPTER 11 THE EFFECTS OF VOCAL CUES THAT ACCOMPANY SPOKEN WORDS 339
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with more babyish faces received more baby talk than same-age children who had
more mature-looking faces.
Infants prefer baby talk to normal adult speech, which suggests that it serves a
variety of functions. Various functions have been proposed for baby talk, including
getting the infants attention, promoting language development, clarifying the
speakers message, and creating an emotional bond. The last of these propositions
has been supported by research showing that motherese is part of an attachment
vocalization repertoire that humans are especially sensitive to (Chan & Thompson,
2011). As further evidence of this, Gordon, Zagoory-Sharon, Leckman, and
Feldman (2010) found that the amount of motherese displayed was linked to
oxytocin, a hormone thought to promote motherinfant bonding. Finally, Trainor
and colleagues (2000) noted that baby talk contains more free emotional expression
than typical adult-directed speech but is very similar in terms of acoustic characteris-
tics to adult-directed speech that emphasized the communication of emotion. What
makes baby talk distinctive, the authors argued, is that it contains more freely
expressed emotion than typical adult-directed speech does.
Particular sounds also might vary depending upon the age of the listener; for
example, Green, Nip, Wilson, Mefferd, and Yunusova (2010) showed that, relative
to how they spoke to other adults, mothers used an elevated pitch and a slower
speaking rate when making vowel sounds to their infants.
Certain groups of adults who have childlike qualities attributed to themor
who are perceived (often erroneously) as cognitively impaired, such as the institu-
tionalized elderly or the deafare also spoken to in a way that resembles baby
talk. Psychologists are especially interested in this kind of secondarybaby talk
because of the possibility that it contributes to the stigmatizing of groups perceived
as dependent or incompetent (Caporael, 1981).
With this in mind, DePaulo and Coleman (1986, 1987) compared the warmth of
speech directed toward children, adults with mental retardation, nonnative adult
speakers of English, and native adult English speakers, hypothesizing that warmth
one component of baby talkwould decrease across these four groups. The predic-
tion was supported. In addition, when considering those with mental retardation
alone, speakers displayed more vocal warmth when speaking to those with more
extreme retardation. Particular ways of using the language also differed among the
groups: Speech to children was clearer, simpler, more attention maintaining, and had
longer pauses; speech to those with retardation was very similar to this; speech to for-
eigners, however, was more similar to that addressed to normal peopleexcept for
being more repetitive. The sex of the person being spoken to also influences how we
speak. Men are spoken to more loudly than women are by both men and women
(Markel et al., 1972). Similarly, in a study of peoplesvoicesontelevisiondramas
and talk shows, men were spoken to more dominantly, condescendingly, and
unpleasantly than women were by both men and women (Hall & Braunwald,
1981). However, listeners who heard the speaker without knowing the gender of the
person to whom they were speaking erroneously thought that women spoke meekly
to men, when in fact women and men both spoke more powerfully to men.
Men and women use vocal qualities, such as pitch, to assess the attractiveness
of members of the same and other sex as well as to communicate their attractive-
ness to members of the other sex. Regarding the latter, women were observed to
340 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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use a higher-pitched voice, which males find attractive, when leaving a voicemail
for a man they found to be attractive (Fraccaro et al., 2011). Women, on the
other hand, tend to find lower-pitched voices in men more attractive (Simmons,
Peters, & Rhodes, 2011). Lastly, both mens and womens feelings of jealousy
were shown to be greater when they had imagined a member of the other sex with
a more attractive voice pitch flirting with their romantic partner (OConnor &
Feinberg, 2012).
VOCAL CUES AND EMOTION
Vocal cues are widespread among many animal species for communication about
territory, relationship, identity, alarm, physical states, and emotion (Kitchen,
Cheney, & Seyfarth, 2003; Marier, Evans, & Hauser, 1992). Darwin viewed the
voice as a primary channel for emotional signals in both humans and animals.
In this section we examine what is known about emotional expression in the
human voice.
One persistent question is whether people can identify emotions in the voice.
The answer is definitely yes.There is substantial accuracy even when speakers
and listeners are not from the same culture, and listeners in different cultures tend
to make the same errors and confusions when judging emotions in the voice,
though there appears also to be some advantage in judging voices from ones own
culture (Juslin & Laukka, 2003; Scherer, 2003; Scherer, Banse, & Wallbott, 2001).
Pittam and Scherer (1993) concluded that the recognition of emotion from the
voice is four to five times what would be expected if listeners were simply guessing,
and Juslin and Laukka (2003) concluded that across five different emotions, accu-
racy of judgment averaged 90 percent when calculated against a guessing rate of
50 percent.
Another question concerns whether people use vocal cues in visual or thematic
emotion-judgment tasks, and whether they do so in a similar fashion across cul-
tures. Jaywant and Pell (2012) observed that participants made fewer errors in
judging facial expressions when they had first heard vocal cues expressing the
same emotion state as the face. Sauter, Eisner, Ekman, and Scott (2010) had parti-
cipants from two distinct cultural groups (English, European, and the Himba from
Nambia) listen to a story in their native language that was designed to arouse a
specific emotion state, such as sadness. Next, participants listened to two vocaliza-
tions of emotions. These emotional vocalizations were produced by members from
their own cultural group as well as from members of the other cultural group.
Importantly, one of two emotional vocalizations matched and the other did not
match the emotional content of the story. Results showed that members of both
cultures were able to match basic emotion states in vocal cues (anger, fear, disgust,
amusement, sadness, surprise) to the emotional content of the story, and that they
were able to do this using vocal cues from members of their own cultural group as
well as those from members of the other cultural group.
Concerned that most emotion-judgment tasks present several negative
emotionssuch as anger, sadness, and fearbut typically only one positive emo-
tion, namely happiness, Sauter and Scott (2007) presented five different positive
emotions for judgment through the vocal channel. Listeners in both Great Britain
CHAPTER 11 THE EFFECTS OF VOCAL CUES THAT ACCOMPANY SPOKEN WORDS 341
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and Sweden showed significant accuracy in distinguishing between amusement,
contentment, sensual pleasure, achievement/triumph, and relief. With respect to
cross-cultural comparisons, though, Sauter, Eisner, Ekman, and Scott (2010)
found that English participants recognized the nonbasic positive emotions of
achievement/triumph, relief, and sensual pleasure in the vocalizations of Himba
speakers, but that Himba participants did not recognize these emotions in the voca-
lizations of English speakers.
Neumann and Strack (2000) have further demonstrated that hearing voices
expressing different emotions also elicits the corresponding emotional feelings, as
reflected both in the listeners own voice tone and in self-ratings of mood. These,
like other findings on emotional contagion(see Chapter 9), show that emotions
can be conveyed and shared outside of our conscious awareness (Chartrand &
Bargh, 1999).
The notion that a listener might respond with the same kind of emotion as
expressed in the speakers voice suggests a parallel situation that we experience
very often when we listen to music. Music can create potent emotional effects, and
indeed experimenters often use music to induce emotions in laboratory studies.
Some researchers have studied the accuracy of identifying emotions in music using
methods very similar to those used to study the communication of emotion in the
voice. For example, a performer might be asked to play a passage on the piano so
as to convey anger or happiness. Accuracy on the part of listeners can then be mea-
sured. Juslin and Laukka (2003) found, in reviewing these studies, that accuracy
for judging emotions in music is very similar to accuracy in judging emotions in
the voice, and furthermore that many of the same acoustic qualities account for
the effects. For example, tempo and intensity increase in anger and happiness in
both modalities, and variability in intensity is increased for anger and fear but is
decreased for sadness and tenderness in both modalities. As more specific evidence
of this, it appears that the minor thirdis important both in music and in the pitch
of the human voice for communicating the emotion state of sadness (Curtis &
Bharucha, 2010).
You may have wondered how it is possible to separate the nonverbal voice
qualities from the words being spoken in studies of vocal communication. Several
methods have been used to accomplish this essential goal, and accuracy may vary
somewhat depending on the method used (Juslin & Scherer, 2005). Some studies
use meaningless content,usually having the speaker say numbers or letters
while trying to convey various emotional states. As early as 1964, studies of this
type were conducted (Davitz, 1964). Speakers were instructed to express 10 differ-
ent feelings while reciting parts of the alphabet. These expressions were recorded
and played to judges, who were asked to identify the emotion being expressed
from the list of 10 emotions. Generally, emotions or feelings were communicated
far beyond chance expectation. It is difficult to tell, of course, whether the commu-
nicators were using the same tonal or vocal cues they would use in real-life emo-
tional reactions.
Other studies have controlled verbal cues by using constant content,in
which a speaker reads a standard passage while attempting to simulate different
emotional states. The underlying assumption is that the passage selected is neutral
in emotional tone. Another approach is to try to ignore content and focus attention
342 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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on the pauses, breathing rate, and other characteristics that suggest the persons
emotional state. This method is frequently used in psychotherapy to identify signs
of anxiety.
Some studies have used electronic filtering to eliminate verbal content (Rogers,
Scherer, & Rosenthal, 1971). A low-pass filter will hold back the higher frequen-
cies of speech on which word recognition depends. The finished product sounds
much like someone talking on the other side of a wall. One common problem with
the electronically filtered technique is that some of the nonverbal vocal cues are elim-
inated in the filtering process, creating an artificial stimulus. Although some aspects
of vocal quality may be lost in the filtering process, a listener can still adequately per-
ceive pitch, rate, and loudness in order to judge emotional content. An advantage of
the filtering method is that naturally occurring speech can be used, in contrast to the
previous methods, which require the speaker to recite a standard text.
Filtered speech is the most popular method of making words unintelligible and
has produced some very intriguing results, some of which we summarize here. In a
study of doctors, Milmoe, Rosenthal, Blane, Chafetz, and Wolf (1967) found that
the more anger was perceived in the filtered voices of doctors talking about their
alcoholic patients, the less successful they were in getting those patients into ther-
apy. Later research verified that the tone of voice used when talking about patients
carries over into the way doctors talk to patients (Rosenthal, Vanicelli, & Blanck,
1984). Another study of physicians found that those who provided more medical
information to their patientsand were more competent, according to technical
standards for conducting a proper interview, diagnosing correctly, and so forth
were those with the lowest ratings of boredom in short, filtered clips of their voices
(Hall, Roter, & Katz, 1987). It has also been found that a patients satisfaction
with a medical visit is greatest when the physicians words are rated as more pleas-
ant and when the physicians filtered voice tone is rated as more angry and anx-
ious. The combination of pleasant words and not-so-pleasant voice may convey a
desirable message of concern and involvement in the patients problems (Hall,
Roter, & Rand, 1981). Consistent with this finding is a study (Ambady et al.,
2002) that did not use filtered speech but rather ratings of surgeonsunfiltered
voices while talking to their patients, plus statistical controls for the verbal content.
That study found that surgeons whose voices were more dominant and less anx-
ious were more likely to have been sued by patients. In the most recent study of
this type, primary care physiciansvoices were recorded during medical visits. Inde-
pendent listenersratings of their filtered speech revealed that physicians whose
patients were more satisfied had voices that were warm and supportive (Haskard,
Williams, DiMatteo, Heritage, & Rosenthal, 2008).
Another study analyzed the filtered speech of airline passengers talking to air-
port agents about their lost baggage (Scherer & Ceschi, 2000). In that study, the
number of feltand unfeltsmiles (see Chapter 9) was counted, and judges
made ratings of the passengersfiltered speech. A higher frequency of feltsmiles
indicative of genuine enjoyment (see Chapter 9) was related to less vocal anger, less
worry, and less resignation and to more good humor. Inauthentic or unfelt
smiles, on the other hand, were unrelated to the voice ratings. This and the preced-
ing studies support the validity of filtered speech ratings as an indicator of peoples
feelings and as a predictor of important outcomes in real-life situations.
CHAPTER 11 THE EFFECTS OF VOCAL CUES THAT ACCOMPANY SPOKEN WORDS 343
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Although, on average, accuracy for judging emotions from the voice is very high,
studies do vary in how accurately emotions are judged from voice cues. One reason
for this involves the differing methods by which such observations may be made, for
example, how long the voice samples are, which content-masking technique is used,
or how dissimilar the response alternatives are. Another reason is that speakers and
listeners vary widely in how accurately they can express and recognize different emo-
tions (see Chapter 3). For example, in the Davitz and Davitz (1959) study, one speak-
ersexpressionswereidentifiedcorrectlyonly23percentofthetime,whereasanother
speaker communicated accurately over 50 percent of the time. In that study, like
many others, accuracy was defined in terms of how well listeners could identify the
emotion the speaker was asked to express. Listenersaccuracy in recognizing the
intended emotion varied widely, just as the speakerssending accuracy did.
Thus, depending on the skills that individuals bring to a communication situa-
tion, they may or may not succeed in sending and receiving vocal emotion cues
well. Accuracy in judging emotions from the voice develops with age and appears
to be correlated with similar psychological characteristics as is skill in judging
other nonverbal cues (Baum & Nowicki, 1998; see Chapter 3). For example, chil-
dren may learn vocal expressions of emotion later than visual expressions of them
on the face or body of others (Nelson & Russell, 2011). Efforts are under way to
link various abilities, such as decoding vocal cues and emotional understanding, to
the broader notion of Emotional Intelligence (Thingujam, Laukka, & Elfenbein,
2012). On the flip side, deficits in more than one domain have been noted for vari-
ous disorders. For example, persons with autism and Asperger syndrome score
lower than comparison groups on judging both vocal and facial emotion cues
(Rutherford, Baron-Cohen, & Wheelwright, 2002), and the same is true for people
with anorexia nervosa (Kucharska-Pietura, Nilolaou, Masiak, & Treasure, 2004).
Another qualification to any statement about the voices overall ability to com-
municate emotions is that some emotions are easier to communicate than others.
For example, one study found that vocal anger was identified 63 percent of the
time, whereas vocal pride was identified correctly only 20 percent of the time.
Another study found that joy and hate were easily recognized in the voice, but
shame and love were the most difficult to recognize. In general, anger, joy, and
sadness are easier to recognize in the voice than fear and disgust (Banse & Scherer,
1996; Pittam & Scherer, 1993).
In a review of studies on accuracy of judging anxiety, Harrigan, Wilson, and
Rosenthal (2004) found that accuracy for judging state anxietythat is, anxiety
being experienced at a given momentwas higher when judgments were based on
the voice alone than when they were based on video cues alone. However, for trait
anxiety, which is a personality tendency to be anxious, this was reversedin fact,
listeners could not judge trait anxiety from the voice at all. Possibly, the immediate
physiological arousal associated with state anxiety produces easily noticed vocal
changes, such as tremor or speech errors.
In addition to demonstrating that emotions can be conveyed through the voice,
researchers have learned a great deal about how the voice conveys emotion.
Although efforts are under way to specify the acoustic features associated with
nonverbal vocalizations of specific emotion state (Sauter, Eisner, Calder, & Scott,
2010), there currently is no dictionaryof emotion cues for the voice, any more
344 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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than there is for any nonverbal channel. You cannot identify key acoustic features
and then look them up in a book somewhere to see which emotion is being
expressed. Many factors enter into the total picture of emotional expression: con-
textual cues, the words being spoken, other nonverbal behaviors, individual differ-
ences in the people, and the fact that there is undoubtedly more than one way to
express a given emotion. With these qualifications in mind, we now summarize
key vocal cues associated with emotion.
Anxiety induced in a particular circumstance, or state anxiety, is often associ-
ated with nonfluencies or speech disruptions (Cook, 1965; Mahl, 1956; Siegman,
1987). Non-Ahspeech disruptions are sentence changes (starting a sentence one
way and changing its form part way through), sentence incompletions (starting a
sentence and abandoning it to make a different point), stutters, repetitions, omis-
sions (of words or parts of words), tongue slips, and intruding incoherent sounds.
In contrast, a final kind of speech disruption, called Aherrors or filled pauses,
is not associated with anxiety or stress but seem rather to have other meanings
(see the section Hesitations, Pauses, Silence, and Speechlater in this chapter).
Personality dimensions related to anxiety have also been studied in relation to
the production of speech disturbances. Harrigan, Suarez, and Hartman (1994)
obtained anxiety ratings of verbatim transcripts of the speech of individuals who
varied in state and trait anxiety as well as in repression, which is the need to deny
negative thoughts, impulses, or behaviors. Repressorsspeech was judged to be the
most anxious, more so even than the speech of people who were highly trait-
anxious but not repressive. The authors attributed these effects to differences in
the frequency of speech disturbances among groups. Although repressors do not
view themselves as high on trait anxiety, their vocal behavior says otherwise. Per-
haps anxious people are more aware of their anxiety and can take steps to conceal
or control it, whereas repressive people are not aware of it, increasing the chances
that anxiety cues will leak outthrough the voice.
In an experiment on therapeutic treatment for social anxiety, those patients
who responded favorably to the intervention showed changes in key vocal variables
when asked to give a speech in front of a groupspecifically in showing a lower
vocal pitch and greater continuity of speech, measured as having a smaller percent-
age of their speaking time spent in silence (Laukka et al., 2008). In general, stress
from any source makes the voice rise in pitch. In one of the earliest demonstrations,
Williams and Stevens (1972) analyzed recordings of the radio announcer who
described, live on the air, the horrifying explosion and burning of the hydrogen-
filled zeppelin Hindenburg at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937. Comparison of his
voice before and immediately after the disaster showed the fundamental frequency
rose, with much less fluctuation in frequency.
Scherers work has encompassed a broad range of emotions. In a 1974 study, he
used artificial sounds, rather than spontaneous speech, to approach the question of
which vocal features are associated with which emotions. Listeners rated synthesized
tones on 10-point scales of pleasantness, potency, activity, and evaluation and indi-
cated whether the stimuli could or could not be an expression of interest, sadness,
fear, happiness, disgust, anger, surprise, elation, or boredom. Generally speaking,
tempo and pitch variation influence a wide range of judgments about emotional
expressions. Table 11-2 summarizes the results of several of Scherers studies.
CHAPTER 11 THE EFFECTS OF VOCAL CUES THAT ACCOMPANY SPOKEN WORDS 345
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Scherer (1986) expanded his predictions to include 12 different emotions
such as irritation/cold anger, grief/desperation, elation/joyand 18 different acous-
tic variables such as average fundamental frequency, variability in loudness, and
speech rate. In comparing these theoretical predictions to actual research, Scherer
found some impressive consistencies but also considerable variation, partly due to
great differences in how the studies were conducted and the number of studies con-
ducted. Joy/elation is well studied and is associated with higher average frequency,
or pitch; greater frequency range; greater frequency variability; higher average
intensity, or loudness; and faster rate. Consistent with the results for joy/elation,
the perception of how much affection is perceived in a speaker is positively pre-
dicted by how high-pitched and expressively variable the voice is (Floyd & Ray,
2003). Anger is conveyed by higher frequency and intensity, with a greater fre-
quency range and faster speech rate for hotanger. Fear is shown by higher
frequency, especially high-frequency energy, and faster speech rate. Sadnessat
least the quiet, resigned sortinvolves lower average frequency and intensity, has
downward-directed contours, and is slower (Pittam & Scherer, 1993; Scherer,
Banse, Wallbott, & Goldbeck, 1991). Research is progressing on identifying emo-
tions from acoustic variables, so that computers may some day be able to recognize
vocal emotions almost as well as human listeners do (Banse & Scherer, 1996).
VOCAL CUES, COMPREHENSION, AND PERSUASION
In addition to its role in personality and emotional judgments, the voice also plays
a part in retention and attitude change, which has been primarily studied in public
speaking. For many years, introductory public speaking textbooks have stressed the
importance of delivery in the rhetorical situation. Delivery of the speech, rather
than speech content, was perhaps the first area of rhetoric to receive quantitative
TABLE 11-2 ACOUSTIC CONCOMITANTS OF EMOTIONAL DIMENSIONS
Amplitude Variation Moderate Pleasantness, Activity, Happiness
Pitch variation Moderate Anger, boredom, disgust, fear
Pitch contour Down Pleasantness, boredom, sadness
Up Potency, anger, fear, surprise
Pitch level Low Pleasantness, boredom, sadness
Tempo Slow Boredom, disgust, sadness
Fast Pleasantness, activity, potency, anger, fear
Duration (shape) Round Potency, boredom, disgust, fear, sadness
Filtration (lack of
overtones)
Low Sadness, pleasantness, boredom, happiness
Moderate Potency, activity
Tonality Atonal Disgust
Tonal-minor Anger
Rhythm Not rhythmic Boredom
Rhythmic Activity, fear, surprise
346 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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examination by speech researchers. Almost every study that isolated delivery as a
variable showed that delivery did matter. It had positive effects on the amount of
information remembered, the amount of attitude change elicited from the audience,
and the amount of credibility audience members attributed to the speaker.
Typical prescriptions for use of the voice in delivering a public speech include
the following:
1. Use variety in volume, rate, pitch, and articulation. The probability of desir-
able outcomes is less when we use a constant rate, volume, pitch, and articu-
lation. Being consistently overprecise may be as ineffective as being overly
sloppy in articulation.
2. Base decisions concerning loudsoft, fastslow, precisesloppy, or highlow on
what is appropriate for a given audience in a given situation.
3. Avoid excessive nonfluencies.
Regarding the third prescription, Engstrom (1994) found that participantsratings
of an announcers competence dropped as the numbers of speech errors or nonflu-
ent speech made by the announcer increased.
VOCAL CUES,COMPREHENSION,AND RETENTION
Several studies tend to support the prescriptions for vocal variety in increasing
audience comprehension and retention. Woolbert (1920), in perhaps the earliest
study of this type, found that large variations of rate, force, pitch, and quality pro-
duced high audience retention when compared with a no-variation condition.
Glasgow (1952), using prose and poetry, established two conditions for study:
good intonationand mono-pitch.Multiple-choice tests, following exposure to
these differing vocal samples, showed that mono-pitch decreased comprehension by
more than 10 percent for both prose and poetry. Other research suggests that mod-
erately poor vocal quality and pitch patterns, nonfluencies, mispronunciation, and
even stuttering do not interfere significantly with comprehension, although listeners
generally find these conditions unpleasant (Kibler & Barker, 1972; Klinger, 1959;
Utzinger, 1952). All of these studies indicate that listeners are rather adaptable. It
probably takes constant and extreme vocal unpleasantries to affect comprehension,
and even then the listener may adapt. Poor vocal qualities probably contribute
more to a listeners perception of the speakers personality or mood than to a
decrease in comprehension.
Children are required to understand what adults are referring to when they
speak about an object, such as a bunny. Do children use vocal cues to do this?
Berman, Chambers, and Graham (2010) research suggests that 4-year-olds do.
They conducted an experiment in which children heard an adult say a sentence,
such as Look at the bunny,in either a neutral, happy, or sad voice. Importantly,
there were three objects the children could look at: a distractor item, such as a
horse; a clean, intact bunny; or dirty, ragged, broken bunny. Results showed that
4-year-olds (but not 3-year-olds) visually fixated most often to the broken
bunny when they heard the sad voice, and most often to the intactbunny when
they heard the happy voice. These findings suggest that 4-year-old children were
using vocal cues to determine which object the speaker might be referring to in the
CHAPTER 11 THE EFFECTS OF VOCAL CUES THAT ACCOMPANY SPOKEN WORDS 347
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sentence Look at the bunny.It also appears that children as young as 15 months
are aware of when a persons action does not match her preceding vocal cue
(Hoicka & Wang, 2011).
The study of speaking rate by itself yields additional evidence of listener flexi-
bility and the lack of impact on comprehension of seemingly poor voice-related
phenomena. The normal speaking rate is between 125 and 190 words per minute.
Some researchers believe comprehension begins to decrease once the rate exceeds
200 words per minute, but other experts in speeded speech place the level of signif-
icant decline in comprehension at between 250 and 275 words per minute. King
and Behnke (1989) point out that time-compressed speech adversely affects com-
prehensive listeningthat is, understanding a message and remembering it for the
futurebut does not adversely affect short-term listening (40 seconds or less) or
interpretive listening (reading between the lines) until very high levels of compres-
sion are reached, around 60 percent. Obviously, individual ability to process infor-
mation at rapid rates differs widely. The inescapable conclusion from studies of
speech rate, however, is that we can comprehend information at much more rapid
rates than we ordinarily are exposed to. In an experiment in which individual lis-
teners were allowed to vary the rates of presentation at will, the average choice was
1.5 times normal speed (Orr, 1968).
VOCAL CUES AND PERSUASION
What is the role of the voice in persuasive situations? It is clear we can communi-
cate various attitudes with our voice alone, for example, friendliness, hostility,
superiority, and submissiveness. Then what contribution, if any, do vocal cues
make toward changing peoples attitudes?
Mehrabian and Williams (1969) conducted an early series of studies on the
nonverbal correlates of intended and perceived persuasiveness. The following vocal
cues were associated with both increasing intent to persuade and decoded as
enhancing the persuasiveness of a communication: more speech volume, higher
speech rate, and less halting speech. This early study has been followed by many
studies on the relation of vocal cues to attitude change. The following vocal cues
are associated with greater perceived persuasiveness, credibility, competence, or
actual attitude change (Burgoon, Birk, & Pfau, 1990; Leigh & Summers, 2002).
However, an upper limit to the effective range on each of these variables is likely,
so that extremes would produce less, not more, credibility or persuasion.
Fluent, nonhesitant speech
Shorter response latencies, the pauses when speakers switch turns
More pitch variation
Louder voice
Faster speech, as measured by words per minute or length of pauses
Of all these cues, faster speech has received the most attention in its relation to the
persuasion process (Miller, Maruyama, Beaber, & Valone, 1976; Street, Brady, &
Lee, 1984). Why is fast speech persuasive? Possibly, faster speakers seem more
credible because we assume they really know what they are talking about and
truly believe it themselves. But when listening to a faster-speaking persuader, we
348 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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may also be kept so busy processing the message that we have little chance to
develop counterarguments in our heads. Or we may be simply distracted by notic-
ing the faster speech, and this interferes with our ability to focus on the message
and develop counterarguments (Woodall & Burgoon, 1983). It is also important
to note that faster speech does not always produce more persuasion. Smith and
Shaffer (1991) found that faster speech increased persuasion when the message
was counterattitudinalthat is, when it favored a position that opposed the listen-
ers preexisting attitudebut it decreased persuasion when the message was consis-
tent with the listeners preexisting attitude.
At this point you may legitimately ask, So what?What if we know the
voices potential for eliciting various responses related to comprehension, attitude
change, and speaker credibility? Obviously in real-life situations, visual and verbal
cues, prior publicity and experiences with the speaker, and a multitude of other
interacting factors can reduce the importance of vocal cues. In short, specific non-
verbal cues do not operate in isolation in human interaction, as they do in the
experiments reported here. For the most part, we do not know what their role is
in contextthat is, in combination with other cues and in settings outside the lab-
oratory. DeGroot and Motowidlos (1999) study takes us a step in that direction.
These investigators asked managers in companies to let themselves be interviewed
as though they were applying for their job. The managersvocal cues were then
related to their actual supervisorsperformance ratings of them and also to naive
observersimpressions of the taped interviews. A vocal composite that consisted of
faster speech rate, more pitch variability, fewer pauses, lower pitch, and less ampli-
tude variability was a significant predictor of both the performance ratings and the
favorability of listenersreactions, which led the authors of the study to believe that
people who speak with this desirable set of vocal characteristics will be better able
to perform well on the job, owing to the favorability of peoples responses to them.
Burgoon and colleagues (1990) also examined a wide range of different cues, vocal
cues and those relating to face and body, in a study of credibility and persuasive-
ness. Controlling for other nonverbal behaviors, vocal fluency remained the stron-
gest predictor of judged competence, a dimension of credibility, and it was one of
the two strongest predictors of judged persuasiveness. Complementing these studies
of specific vocal cues, Ambady, Krabbenhoft, and Hogan (2006) used more global
ratings of electronically filtered speech to predict ratings of sales effectiveness, as
made by upper management, in a sample of sales managers. Even though the sales
managersvoice clips totaled only 1 minute each, ratings of qualities such as emo-
tion, empathy, cooperation, and enthusiasm as perceived in the voice were strongly
correlated with their superiorspositive evaluations of them.
VOCAL CUES AND TURN TAKING IN CONVERSATIONS
Thus far we have discussed the role of vocal cues in communicating interpersonal atti-
tudes, emotions, and information about thespeaker.Vocalcuesalsoplayanimpor-
tant role in managing the interaction and are part of a system of cues that helps us
structure our interactionsthat is, who speaks when, to whom, and for how long.
Rules for turn taking, or floor apportionment,may have as much to do with
how a conversation is perceived as does the actual verbal content of the interaction
CHAPTER 11 THE EFFECTS OF VOCAL CUES THAT ACCOMPANY SPOKEN WORDS 349
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(Duncan, 1973; Wiemann & Knapp, 1975). You can probably recall instances
where turn-taking rules played a significant role in your responses: for example,
when a long-winded speaker would not let you get a word in edgewise; when a
passive interactant refused to take the conversational ballyou offered; when
you were confronted with an interrupter; or those awkward moments when you
and the other person started talking simultaneously. Obviously, vocal cues are only
some of the signals we use to manage our turn taking (see Chapter 12). Altogether,
we do a remarkable job of negotiating turn taking through nonverbal, including
vocal, cues. Only rarely do we need to explicitly verbalize this informationfor
example, Okay, Lillian, Im finished talking. Now its your turn to talk.Our
use of these signals is mostly unconscious but conforms to definite rules of usage
nonetheless. These have been described extensively by Duncan and Fiske (1977) in
their analyses of two-person conversations held in a laboratory setting. Certain
cues were almost invariably present when smooth turn taking took place, five of
which were vocal, either verbal or nonverbal. None of these cues seems to be
more important than the others; rather it seems that a smooth switch is best pre-
dicted by the sheer number of these cues. In other words, redundancysending
several equivalent-meaning cues simultaneouslypromotes smooth regulation of
conversation. These cues included the speakers pitch or a drawl at the end of a
unit of speech, the grammatical completion of a unit of speech, and the use of cer-
tain routine verbal phrases. The next sections elaborate on these and other turn-
regulating behaviors identified in research (Cappella, 1985; Rosenfeld, 1987).
TURN YIELDING
To yield a turn means to signal you are finished and that the other person can start
talking. Sometimes we do this by asking a question, causing the pitch to rise at the
end of our comment. Another unwritten rule most of us follow is that questions
require, or often demand, answers. We also can drop our pitch, sometimes with a
drawl on the last syllable, when finishing a declarative statement that concludes
our intended turn. If the cues are not sufficient for the other person to start talking,
we may have to add a trailer on the end. The trailer may be silence or may take the
form of a filled pause, for example, ya know,”“so, ah,or or something.The
filled pauses reiterate the fact that you are yielding, and they fill a silence that
might otherwise indicate the others insensitivity to your signals or your own
inability to make them clear.
TURN REQUESTING
We can also use vocal cues to show others that we want to say something.
Although an audible inspiration of breath alone may not be a sufficient cue, it
does help signal turn requesting. The mere act of interrupting or simultaneous talk-
ing may signal an impatience to get the speaking turn. Sometimes you can inject
vocalizations during normal pausing of the other speaker. These stutter starts
may be the beginning of a sentence (III…”) or merely vocal buffers (Ah
Er Ah …”). Another method for requesting a turn is to assist the other per-
son in finishing quickly. This can be done by increasing the rapidity of our
350 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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responses, much like the increased rapidity of the head nods when we are anxious
to leave a situation in which another person has the floor. Normally, back-channel
cues, such as Uh-huh,”“Yeah,and Mmm-hmm,are used to encourage the
other to continue speaking and to signal attentiveness. However, when these cues
are used rapidly, the message can be Get finished so I can talk.
TURN MAINTAINING
Sometimes we want to keep the floor. It may be to show our status or to avoid
unpleasant feedback, or perhaps it reflects some exaggerated sense of the impor-
tance of our own words and ideas. Common vocal cues in these instances may
include the following:
1. Increasing volume and rate when turn-requesting cues are sensed
2. Increasing the frequency of filled pauses
3. Decreasing the frequency and duration of silent pauses
Although Lalljee and Cooks (1969) research does not support the use of pauses
for control, Rochester (1973) cites several studies that support the following
conclusions:
1. More filled pauses and fewer silent pauses are found in dialogue than
monologue.
2. More filled pauses and fewer silent pauses are not found when people want to
break off speaking.
3. More filled pauses and fewer silent pauses are more likely when the speaker
lacks visual means of controlling the conversation, as on the telephone.
TURN DENYING
In some instances, we may want the other person to keep talkingto deny the turn
when offered. The back-channel cues we noted earlier may keep the other person
talking by giving reinforcement for what is being said. The rate with which these
cues are delivered, however, is probably slower than when we are requesting a
turn. And, of course, simply remaining silent may dramatically communicate a
turn denial. Silence and pauses are the subjects of our next section.
We wish to reiterate that conversational regulation is a delicate matter involv-
ing a complex coordination of verbal behavior, vocal behavior, gaze, and body
movement. Research finds that even if we would predict a turn switch based on
words and voice, a switch is very unlikely if the speaker looks away from the lis-
tener during the likely switching point or engages in a hand gesture that is main-
tained or not returned to a resting state.
HESITATIONS, PAUSES, SILENCE, AND SPEECH
Spontaneous speech is actually highly fragmented and discontinuous. Goldman-
Eisler (1968) said that even when speech is at its most fluent, two-thirds of spoken
language comes in chunks of less than six words, which strongly suggests that the
CHAPTER 11 THE EFFECTS OF VOCAL CUES THAT ACCOMPANY SPOKEN WORDS 351
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concept of fluency in spontaneous speech is an illusion. Pauses range in length from
milliseconds to minutes. Pauses are subject to considerable variation based on indi-
vidual differences, the kind of verbal task, the amount of spontaneity, and the pres-
sures of the particular social situation.
LOCATION OR PLACEMENT OF PAUSES
Pauses and hesitations are not randomly distributed throughout the speech stream (
Goldman-Eisler, 1968; Merlo & Barbosa, 2010). Goldman-Eisler (1968, p. 13)
outlined places where pauses do occurat both grammatical and nongrammatical
junctures.
Grammatical
1. Naturalpunctuation points, for example, the end of a sentence.
2. Immediately preceding a conjunction whether (a) coordinating, such as and,
but,neither,therefore; or (b) subordinating, such as if,when,while,as,
because.
3. Before relative and interrogative pronouns, for example, who,which,what,
why,whose.
4. When a question is direct or implied: I dont know whether I will.
5. Before all adverbial clauses of time (when), manner (how), and place (where).
6. When complete parenthetical references are made: You can tell that the house
the one on the corneris falling into disrepair.
Nongrammatical
1. Where a gap occurs in the middle or at the end of a phrase: In each of the
cells of the body .
2. Where a gap occurs between words and phrases repeated: (a) The question of
the of the economyand (b) This attitude is narrower than that that of
many South Africans.
3. Where a gap occurs in the middle of a verbal compound: We have taken
issue with them and they are resolved to oppose us.
4. Where the structure of a sentence is disrupted by a reconsideration or a false
start: I think the problem of France is the what we have to remember
about France is .
Analysis of spontaneous speech shows that only 55 percent of the pauses fall into
the grammatical category, whereas oral readers of prepared texts are extremely
consistent in pausing at clause and sentence junctures.
TYPES OF PAUSES
The two major types of pauses are the unfilled, silent pause and the filled pause.
Afilled pause is filled with some type of phonation such as umor uh.Avariety
of sources associate filled pauses with a range of generally undesirable character-
istics. Some people associate filled pauses and repetitions with emotional arousal;
some feel that filled pauses may reduce anxiety but jam cognitive processes.
Goldman-Eisler (1961) found, in four different studies, that unfilled pausing time
352 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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was associated with superior (more concise) stylistic and less probable linguistic
formulations,whereas higher rates of filled pauses were linked to inferior stylis-
tic achievement (long-winded statement) of greater predictability.Livant (1963)
found the time required to solve addition problems was significantly greater when
the subject filled his pauses than when he was silent. Several experimenters reached
similar conclusions: When speakers fill pauses, they also impair their performance.
Thus in a heated discussion, you may maintain control of the conversation by fill-
ing the pauses, but you may also decrease the quality of your contribution. How-
ever, too many filled or unfilled pauses may receive negative evaluations from
listeners (Christenfeld, 1995). Lalljee (1971) found that too many unfilled pauses
by the speaker caused listeners to perceive the speaker as anxious, angry, or con-
temptuous; too many filled pauses evoked perceptions of the speaker as anxious or
bored. Although these studies suggest that filled pauses are generally to be avoided,
research also finds that in university lecturers, their use is correlated with more com-
plex thought processes and use of a larger vocabulary (Schachter, Christenfeld,
Ravina, & Bilous, 1991; Schachter, Rauscher, Christenfeld, & Crone, 1994).
Filled pauses show up, interestingly, much more in the speech of men than that
of women (Hall, 1984). We might think of men as more assertive in general, but
Siegman (1987) observed that more filled pauses are usually associated with cau-
tious and hesitant speech(p. 398). Perhaps men are more socially uncomfortable
than women are. It may be, however, that filled pauses are serving another func-
tion altogetherkeeping the speakers turn from being taken over by the other per-
son, which may be of more concern for men.
REASONS WHY PAUSES OCCUR
During the course of spontaneous speech, we are confronted with situations that
require decisions as to what to say and what lexical or structural form to put it in.
One school of thought relates hesitancy in speech to the uncertainty of predicting
the cognitive and lexical activity while speaking. The speaker may be reflecting on
decisions about the immediate message or may even be projecting into the past or
futurethat is, I dont think she understood what I said earlieror If she says
no, what do I say then?Thus the assumption is that these hesitation pauses are
actually delays due to competing processes taking place in the brain. Goldman-
Eisler indeed found that pause time while interpreting cartoons was twice as long
as while describing them. It also was observed that with each succeeding trial (i.e.,
with increasing reductions in spontaneity) there was a decline in pausing. Recent
research continues to support the theory that longer speech latencies and a rela-
tively large number of pauses are sometimes due to the complexity of the message
being formulated (Greene & Ravizza, 1995).
It has been argued that speakers use fillers, such as uhand um,to signal
that the listener should expect either a minor or major delay in speaking (Clark &
Fox Tree, 2002). However, recent work by OConnell and Kowal (2005) has called
this into question, finding that such fillers were not usually followed by silent
pauses.
Another possible explanation for some pausing behavior involves what is
described as disruption behavior.Instead of representing time for planning, the
CHAPTER 11 THE EFFECTS OF VOCAL CUES THAT ACCOMPANY SPOKEN WORDS 353
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pause may indicate a disruption due to an emotional state that may have developed
from negative feedback or time pressures. These disruptions may take many forms:
fears about the subject matter under discussion, desire to impress the listener with
verbal or intellectual skills, pressure to perform other tasks simultaneously, or pres-
sure to produce verbal output immediately.
Pauses may also be used to help children learn about turn taking in conversa-
tions. Bergeson, Miller, and McCune (2006) observed that mothers used longer
pauses when talking with older as opposed to younger infants, thus giving them
extra time to respond.
INFLUENCE AND COORDINATION WITHIN THE DYAD
Thus far we have considered hesitations and pauses primarily from the speakers
standpoint. Now we consider the interaction process and the effect of one persons
interpersonal timing on another. For many years, Chapple (1949, 1953; Chapple
& Sayles, 1961) explored the rhythms of dialogue, that is, the degree of synchrony
found in the give-and-take of conversations. This involved noting who talks, when,
and for how long. He developed a standardized interview in which the interviewer
alternates normalattentive responding with silences and, later, interruptions. As
you might suspect, there are many reactions. Some people respond to a nonre-
sponse, or silence, by speeding up; others match the nonresponse; and most try
some combination of the two.
Matarazzos studies of interviewing behavior found most latencies of response
were between 1 and 2 seconds, with the mean about 1.7 seconds (Matarazzo,
Wiens, & Saslow, 1965). Matarazzo also demonstrated response matching,
showing how the interviewer can also control the length of utterance by increasing
the length of his own utterances. As the interviewer extended the length of his
responses, a corresponding increase in the length of responses from the interviewee
resulted. In the same manner, there must be times when pauses beget pauses.
The interviewer also can control response duration by head nodding or saying
Mmm-hmmduring the interviewees response. This demonstrates that these
back-channel responses do indeed encourage a speaker to continue speaking.
SILENCE
Most of the hesitations and pauses we have discussed are relatively short. Some-
times silences may be extended. They may be imposed by the nature of the environ-
ment, for example, in churches, libraries, museums, courtrooms, or hospitals; they
may be imposed for the duration of a given event, as at a funeral or when singing
the national anthem; or they may be self-imposed, such as remaining quiet in the
woods to hear other sounds, or enjoying with a lover the mutual closeness that
silence may bring. Silence can mean virtually anything, and it is charged with
those words that have just been exchanged; words that have been exchanged in
the past; words that have not or will not be said but are fantasized; and words
that may actually be said in the future. For these reasons, it would be absurd to
provide a list of meanings for silence. The meaning of silence, like the meaning of
words, can be deduced only after careful analysis of the communicators, subject
354 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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matter, time, place, culture, and so forth. For example, silence in response to a rhe-
torical question from a professor to a student means something different from one
persons silence in response to anothers question during a brief encounter on the
street (Hey, pardon me, do you know what time it is?).
Some of the many interpersonal functions served by silence include the
following:
Punctuation or accenting, drawing attention to certain words or ideas
Evaluating, providing judgments of anothers behavior, showing favor or dis-
favor, agreement or disagreement, or attacking (e.g., not responding to a com-
ment, greeting, or letter)
Revelation, making something known, or hiding something
Expression of emotions: the silence of disgust, sadness, fear, anger, or love
Mental activity, showing thoughtfulness and reflection or ignorance (Bruneau,
1973; Jaworski, 1993; Jensen, 1973)
There are social and emotional consequences associated with silence. Silence in
response to another persons question, such as Im lost. Do you live around
here?, is likely to be viewed as inappropriate (e.g., Brown & Levinson, 1987).
Koudenburg, Postmes, and Gordijin (2011) conducted an experiment in which par-
ticipants imagined being a person whose statement was followed by silence (or not)
from others in a videotaped group interaction. They found that silence triggered
greater feelings of being distressed, afraid, and hurt as well as feelings of rejection
in participants. It seems that we are sensitive to cues of possible social exclusion,
one of which appears to be silence from others.
SUMMARY
This chapter should leave you with the overall
impression that vocal cues frequently play a
major role in determining responses in human
communication situations. You should be quick,
however, to challenge the cliché that vocal cues
only concern how something is saidfrequently
they are what is said. What is said might be an
attitude (I like youor Im superior to you); it
might be an emotion; it might be the coordina-
tion and management of the conversation; or it
might be the presentation of some aspect of your
personality, background, or physical features.
You should also recognize the important role
vocal stereotypes play in determining responses.
Whether judges are trying to estimate your occu-
pation, sociability, race, degree of introversion,
body type, or any of various other qualities
about you, they will be very apt to respond to
well-learned stereotypes. These stereotypes may
not accurately describe you, but they will be
influential in the interaction between you and
others. Though research has demonstrated con-
siderable interjudge agreement, so far it is diffi-
cult to identify many personality traits that seem
to be judged with consistent accuracy. Although
it is not uncommon for a person speaking a dia-
lect other than ones own to be perceived nega-
tively, speakers who try to correct for speech
differences, and severely violate expectations for
their speech, may also be perceived negatively.
Accurate judgmentsthat is, beyond chance
levelsof age, sex, and status from vocal cues
alone tend to be fairly consistently reported in
the literature. Furthermore, often we are able to
identify specific speakers from voice alone.
Although studies of judgments of emotions
from vocal cues have used different methods, dif-
ferent emotions, listeners with differing sensitiv-
ity, and speakers with differing abilities for
portraying emotions, the results reveal that
CHAPTER 11 THE EFFECTS OF VOCAL CUES THAT ACCOMPANY SPOKEN WORDS 355
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people can make quite accurate judgments of
emotions and feelings from wordless vocal mes-
sages. Some indications are that moderately poor
vocal behaviors do not interfere with a listeners
comprehension of a message, and that if we use
variety in our volume, pitch, and rate, we may
increase our chances of achieving audience com-
prehension in public speeches. Unchanging, con-
stant vocal behavior, particularly at the extremes,
may be less advantageous in achieving audience
comprehension.
Research also suggests that the voice may be
important in some aspects of persuasion. More
fluency, higher rate, more volume, and less halt-
ing speech seem related to intent to persuade and
perceived persuasiveness. We know that the cred-
ibility of the speaker plays an important role in
persuasion in some situations. Some decisions
concerning credibilitysuch as dimensions of
trustworthiness, dynamism, likableness, and
competencyare made from word-free samples
of the voice alone.
Vocal cues also help us manage the give-
and-take of speaking turns. In turn yielding,
turn requesting, turn maintaining, and turn deny-
ing, we use vocal cues to make our intentions
clear.
We also discussed the important role of hesi-
tations or pauses in spontaneous speech. Such
pauses, ordinarily between 1 and 2 seconds
long, may be greatly influenced by the other
interactant, the topic being discussed, and the
nature of the social situation. Pauses may be the
overt manifestation of time used to make deci-
sions about what to say and how to say it, or
they may represent disruptions in the speech
process.
Taken together, these findings show that vocal
cues alone can give much information about a
speaker, and our total reaction to another indi-
vidual is at least somewhat colored by our reac-
tions to these vocal cues. Our perceptions of
verbal cues combine with other verbal and non-
verbal stimuli to mold conceptions used as a
basis for communicating.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Consider stereotypes you have about the
voicefor example, about high or low voices,
fast or slow voices, voices with different
accents, and so forth. Discuss what truth you
think there is to the stereotypes, based on as
many real examples as you can think of.
2. Analyze the phenomenon of sarcasm in terms
of the voice as well as the other cues that
might be associated with it. Act out a variety
of different comments in a sarcastic manner,
and specify the cues you use.
3. Review the different methods for making
voices free of verbal content by applying
content-masking techniques. Why does the
chapter argue that doing this does not free
the voice of content?
4. Theorists argue that some nonverbal chan-
nels are easier than others to self-monitor
and control. Compare the vocal channel to
the face and body channels. How would
you rank these three channels in terms of
how easy they are to monitor and control?
Why?
5. Spend some time paying special attention to
how you use vocal cues to identify a persons
characteristics, such as social class, educa-
tion, sexual orientation, or personality.
A good way to do this would be to sit in a
public place and listen to people speaking
whom you are not looking at. Or you could
listen to the television without looking at it.
Analyze the cues you use. Do you have any
sense of whether your judgments are correct?
6. Use the following link to discover how
speech accents vary by region in the United
States. You will be able to test your ability to
identify the region of the United States a
speaker is from on the basis of his or her
accent: www.sporcle.com/games/druhutch/
americanaccents
356 PART IV THE COMMUNICATORSBEHAVIOR
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COMMUNICATING
IMPORTANT MESSAGES
[PART V]
Our book concludes with a discussion of how the various nonverbal signals we
have discussed thus far combine as communicators pursue critical and familiar out-
comes. Chapter 12 focuses on how nonverbal signals help us effectively communi-
cate and interpret intimacy, power, involvement, identity, and deception in daily
interaction. Chapter 13 examines nonverbal messages in advertising, politics, edu-
cation, culture, health care, and technology. Together, these two chapters show
the importance of understanding nonverbal behavior in effectively managing lifes
most important tasks.
357
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USING NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR IN
DAILY INTERACTION
[CHAPTER12]
Try to imagine yourself telling a high school student how to be a successful college stu-
dent. Your approach probably would break the process into its component parts:
social life, or dating and partying; intellectual life, which might include studying, tak-
ing notes, and relating to professors; organizational life, that is, what campus and
social groups to join; financial life, or how to get by with little money; and so on. As
informative as your explanations and advice in these separate areas may be, you
know they are not enough. You also need to point out how these parts go together to
create complex situations; for example, a person you desire has agreed to go out with
you, but the date will cost a lot of money, and it will occur the night before a big test.
In the same way, this book is designed to make you more knowledgeable about
human interaction and about nonverbal behavior in particular. The preceding chapters
focused on individual parts of the total system: eyes, face, gestures, physical appearance,
voice, and so forth. In this chapter, we show how these component parts combine to
achieve the various communicative outcomes that we strive for in our day-to-day lives.
To fully understand any process, we continually must look at the isolated parts
that make up the system and at how they combine to achieve the systems purpose.
Throughout this book, we have made occasional references to multisignal effects
for example, the role of verbal behavior in judgments of physical attractiveness and
the close interrelationship of gestures with verbal behavior. Edward T. Hall, who
coined the term proxemics, currently used to identify the study of distance and
space, believed we have to consider 19 different behavioral signals to fully under-
stand proximity in human transactions. In this chapter, we look at how various
Nothing in nature is isolated; nothing is without connection to the whole.
Goethe
359
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nonverbal signals help us accomplish the goals of communicating intimacy, communi-
cating status and power, managing the interaction, communicating our identity, and
deceiving others. These outcomes, along with expressing emotion and achieving
understanding, seem to adequately cover the most critical interaction goals.
1
COMMUNICATING INTIMACY
Scholars have studied nonverbal signals associated with intimacy from four different
perspectives, and we will discuss each of them: the display behaviors associated with
romantic courtship, courtship behaviors displayed in nonromantic situations, nonver-
bal behaviors that signal closeness with strangers and acquaintances, and nonverbal
behaviors that signal closeness in more well-established intimate relationships.
COURTSHIP BEHAVIOR
We know that some men and women can exude messages such as Im available,
Im knowledgeable,or I want youwithout saying a word. And it appears that
we have the ability to detect these cues in them, especially those given off by men.
Place, Todd, Penke, and Asendorpf (2009) found that observers of speed-dating
videos were able to detect mens romantic interest in women better than womens
romantic interest in men.
There are popular books available for those who seek to improve their ability to
attract the romantic attention of others via nonverbal signals (Strauss, 2005). These
signals include a thrust of the hips, touch gestures, extra-long eye contact, carefully
looking at the others body, showing excitement and desire in fleeting facial expres-
sions, and gaining close proximity. When subtle enough, these moves will allow
both parties to deny that either had committed themselves to a courtship ritual.
Academic research focusing on flirtation behavior between men and women in
singles bars, hotel cocktail lounges, and bars in restaurants provides some observa-
tional data on the role of nonverbal signals in the courtship process (Grammer,
Kruck, Juette, & Fink, 2000; McCormick & Jones, 1989; Moore, 2010; Perper &
Weis, 1987). Most of the early signaling seems to be performed by women, and
females are the selectorswho attract attention by displaying subtle nonverbal
signals that indicate a readiness for contact. The most frequently observed
1
These goals have been identified in several sources. See the following: Patterson, M. L. (1983). Non-
verbal behavior: A functional perspective. New York: Springer-Verlag; Siegman, A. W., & Feldstein, S.
(Eds.). (1985). Multichannel integrations of nonverbal behavior. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum; and Burgoon,
J. K., & Hoobler, G. D. (2002). Nonverbal signals. In M. L. Knapp & J. A. Daly (Eds.), Handbook of
interpersonal communication (pp. 240299). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. The goals of communicating
emotion, understanding, and persuasion are not covered in this chapter, because it would duplicate too
much material in other chapters. See especially Chapter 9 and Chapter 11 for the expression of emo-
tion; Chapter 3 and Chapter 7 for achieving understanding; and Chapter 11 for persuasion cues. For
multisignal treatments of persuasion, see Burgoon, J. K., Birk, T., & Pfau, M. (1990). Nonverbal beha-
viors, persuasion, and credibility. Human Communication Research, 17, 140169; and Burgoon, J. K.
(2002). Nonverbal influence. In J. P. Dillard & M. Pfau (Eds.), The persuasion handbook: Develop-
ments in theory and practice (pp. 445473). Thousands Oaks, CA: Sage. Also see Brinol, P., & Petty,
R. E. (2003). Overt head movements and persuasion: A self-validation analysis. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 84, 11231139.
360 PART V COMMUNICATING IMPORTANT MESSAGES
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behaviors are three types of eye gaze: a room-encompassing glance; a short, darting
glance at a specific person (see Figure 12-1); and a fixed gaze of at least 3 seconds
at a specific other. Other signals include smiling at a specific other person; laughing
and giggling in response to anothers comments; tossing ones head, a movement
sometimes accompanied by stroking of the hair; grooming, primping, and adjusting
clothes; caressing objects, such as keys or a glass; a solitary dance,that is, keep-
ing time to the music with visible movements; and a wide variety of accidental
touching of some specific other. Researchers did not specifically examine the type
of clothing worn in these studies, nor did they examine the tone of voice used;
both are likely to be influential flirtation behaviors. In an effort to determine
whether these behaviors were more likely to occur in a context where signaling
interest in and attraction to others was expected, the researchers observed the
behavior of women and men in snack bars, meetings, and libraries. None of these
contexts revealed anything close to the number of flirting behaviors found in bars.
Are there male behaviors that increase a mans chances of being selected by a
female in a context like this? A study by Renninger, Wade, and Grammer (2004)
found that females gave preferential attention to males whose nonverbal behavior
signaled positive intentionsinterest shown by glances, openness shown by few
closed-body movementsand also displayed their status, shown by maximizing
the surrounding space and unreciprocated touching of other males.
Does courtship proceed according to a defined sequence of steps? Several stud-
ies suggest it does. Nielsen (1962), citing Birdwhistell, described a courtship
FIGURE 12-1
A woman using her eyes to flirt with a man.
Comstock/Photos.com
CHAPTER 12 USING NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR IN DAILY INTERACTION 361
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danceof the American adolescent. Later, Givens (1978b) and Perper (1985)
described the courtship process in terms of phases. First comes the approach
phase, in which the two people come into the same general area. The second
phase involves acknowledging the others attention and turning toward the other
as an invitation to begin talking. Nonverbal behavior during the interaction phase
involves an increasing amount of fleeting, nonintimate touching and a gradually
increasing intensity in gaze. The sexual arousal phase consists of more intimate
touching, kissing, and other affectionate behaviors, and the resolution phase is
characterized by intercourse. Obviously, either person can short-circuit the process
or skip a step in the sequence at any point.
When courtship is successful, sexual activity is likely to occur at some point.
Whereas women use nonverbal cues to start the courtship process, men apparently
are more involved in those steps leading to intercourse (Moore, 2010). However,
the nonverbal cues that men use successfully to start a sexual relationship with
women are not fully understood. Once in a committed relationship, young men are
more likely to initiate sexual activity than young women, and men do so more with
their nonverbal behavior than their verbal behavior (Vannier & OSullivan, 2011).
There are several limitations to the research on the courtship process that need
to be addressed:
1. Little is understood about the nonverbal courtship signals or behaviors of
homosexuals. As would be expected, touching, smiling, and eye contact are
used to signal sexual attraction among lesbians (Rose & Zand, 2002). How-
ever, it is not clear how nonverbal cues are used to successfully negotiate the
various stages of courtship, from relationship initiation to later sexual activity
among gays and lesbians.
2. In the 21st century, people are turning more and more to alternative forms of
courtship, such as online dating services (e.g., eHarmony) (Whitty, 2009). Men
and women seeking romance must signal their interest in another person and
respond to the romantic overtures of others over cyberspace where the use of
nonverbal cues is often limited to profile images and emoticons (e.g., smileys).
Two people may be actively courting each other before they have had a chance
to gaze, smile, or touch each other in the real world. It is not known if some
of the traditional steps in the real-world courtship process are altered because
of prior online involvement. For example, would the nonverbal signals of
interest be stronger or weaker for online daters actually meeting each other for
the first time relative to individuals meeting for the first time without having
had any prior online contact?
3. Another limitation concerns the lack of attention to the fluctuating nature of
some nonverbal courtship cues. Research has shown that womens scent may
change during ovulation, leading to potential changes in mens courtship-
related behavior. In such studies, men are exposed to samples of womens
body odor on low- versus high-fertility days (i.e., the women are currently
ovulating). Results show that men rate the high-fertility odors as more attrac-
tive and also experience an uptick in their testosterone levels, both of which
could motivate greater courtship intentions on their part (Gildersleeve,
Haselton, Larson, & Pillsworth, 2011; Miller & Maner, 2010). One intriguing
possibility is that, when women are most fertile, their odor cues might increase
362 PART V COMMUNICATING IMPORTANT MESSAGES
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mens willingness to pursue them when they are also showing other signs that
they desire interpersonal contact from men. This fluctuating courtship cue
might be beneficial to the extent that it increases womens chances of reprodu-
cing. In line with this, Haselton, Mortezaie, Pillsworth, Bleske-Rechek, and
Frederick (2007) found that women in relationships appear to dress more
attractively when they are ovulating. Finally, men also may shift their court-
ship behavior, such as their use of language, to appear more attractive when
they are around an ovulating woman (Coyle & Kaschak, 2012).
QUASI-COURTSHIP BEHAVIOR
Scheflen (1965) identified some behaviors he called quasi-courtship behaviors,
meaning they could be used during courtship, but they could also be used to com-
municate affiliative interest of a nonromantic type. Such behaviors may also be
designed to invite affirmations of ones sexual appeal or attractiveness. Depending
on the context, then, a particular cluster of behaviors could be considered friendly,
flirting, or seductive. Misunderstandings associated with such behaviors are at the
heart of many cases of sexual harassment and date rape. It is not uncommon, for
example, for men to perceive more sexual intent in the friendly behavior of
women than women see in the friendly behavior of men (Abbey & Melby, 1986;
Egland, Spitzberg, & Zormeier, 1996; Koeppel, Montagne-Miller, OHair, &
Cody, 1993; Simpson, Gangestad, & Nations, 1996).
Quasi-courtship behavior has some elements of courting, or relating to another
for romantic purposes, but these behaviors are qualified by some other co-occurring
behavior that says, This is not courtship even though you see some similarities to
that behavior.In some cases, quasi-courtship behaviors are used to build rapport;
at other times, they are a form of play. The overall message is one of affiliation.
Scheflen (1965) made sound films of numerous therapeutic encounters, business
meetings, and conferences. His content analysis of these films led him to conclude
that consistent and patterned quasi-courtship behaviors were exhibited in these set-
tings. He then developed a set of classifications for such behaviors:
Courtship readiness defines a category of behaviors characterized by constant
manifestations of high muscle tone, reduced eye bagginess and jowl sag, a
lessening of slouch and shoulder hunching, and decreasing belly sag.
Preening behavior is exemplified by things such as stroking the hair; putting
on makeup; glancing in the mirror; rearranging clothes in a sketchy fashion,
such as leaving buttons open, and adjusting suit coats; tugging at socks; and
readjusting tie knots.
Positional cues are reflected in seating arrangements that suggest, Were not
open to interaction with anyone else.Arms, legs, and torsos are arranged to
inhibit others from entering conversations.
Actions of appeal or invitation include flirtatious glances, gaze holding, rolling
of the pelvis, crossing the legs to expose a thigh, exhibiting the wrists or
palms, protruding the breasts, and others.
Others have discussed Scheflens positional cues in terms of who is excluded and
who is included. The positioning of arms and legs in Figure 12-2 clearly suggests
Were not open to others(in a) and Im with younot him(in b).
CHAPTER 12 USING NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR IN DAILY INTERACTION 363
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LIKING BEHAVIOR OR IMMEDIACY
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mehrabian (1972b) conducted a number of
experimental studies of what he called immediacy, that is, behaviors that indicate
greater closeness or liking. His research identified the following cluster of signals
that distinguish a positive evaluation of an interaction partner from a negative one:
More forward lean
Closer proximity
More eye gaze
More openness of arms and body
More direct body orientation
More touching
More postural relaxation
More positive facial and vocal expressions
A lower frequency of these behaviors, particularly when they are expected, or the
manifestation of opposite behaviors tended to be associated with less intimacy or
even disliking. While confirming the behaviors Mehrabian linked to immediacy,
Ray and Floyd (2006) also found one form of positive vocal expression, vocal vari-
ety, but it is primarily limited to female behavior. Mimicking anothers behavior
may be another way of infusing a greater sense of affiliation in an interaction,
although this would not necessarily be a conscious strategy on the part of the
mimicker (Guéguen & Martin, 2009).
Some combinations of Mehrabians immediacy behaviors also have been found
when people are trying to communicate support (Trees, 2000) and politeness (Trees &
Manusov, 1998). And as we note in Chapter 13, a teachers immediacy beha-
viors with his or her students have been linked to positive student attitudes, both
toward the instructor and the course, as well as some measures of student learning
(Rodriguez, Plax, & Kearney, 1996).
BEING CLOSE IN CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS
The work by Mehrabian and others provides a useful perspective for understanding
how positive and negative evaluations of interaction partners are associated with
clusters of nonverbal signals. In theory, the greater the number of signals activated,
the more powerful the message. Immediacy cues can instruct us on what signals to
FIGURE 12-2
Positional cues.
ba
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All Rights Reserved
364 PART V COMMUNICATING IMPORTANT MESSAGES
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exhibit or look for in our culture during initial interactions with people we do not
know very well. They do not, however, tell us much about how friends or lovers
communicate intimacy. Close relationships to spouses, for example, cannot be
accurately judged by the amount of time spent leaning forward with more direct
body orientation, in close proximity with more eye gaze, and so on (Andersen,
Guerrero, & Jones, 2006; Guerrero & Floyd, 2006; Manusov, Floyd, & Kerssen-
Griep, 1997). Because much of this stereotypical immediacy behavior has presumably
happened early on in these relationships, it needs to be displayed only on certain
occasions once the relationship has become an intimate one. There are times in
established relationships when it is imperative to communicate closeness with
utmost clarity, especially when the relationship has been threatened. At such times,
we are likely to see again the cluster of immediacy signals by the partner or part-
ners who wish to offset any threat to their current level of intimacy. Partners in an
established close relationship also use these stereotyped signals of intimacy when
they want to communicate the closeness of their intimate relationship to outsiders,
who may not understand the subtle and sometimes idiosyncratic ways intimates
communicate their intimacy to each other. But most everyone understands close
proximity, gazing into each others eyes, touching, and all the other signals associ-
ated with the stereotyped immediacy cluster.
Time is an important limitation of much of the work on nonverbal behavior
associated with intimacy, affiliation, or liking. Mehrabians cluster of immediacy
signals is primarily limited to one-time encounters. Ongoing relationships express
different levels of intimacy over time, often indicating liking and disliking in quick
succession. Clore, Wiggins, and Itkin (1975a, 1975b) realized that the sequencing
of immediacy behaviors may have an important influence. They first collected a
large number of verbal statements describing nonverbal liking and disliking; these
behaviors were limited to a females actions toward a male. The large number of
behavioral descriptions was narrowed by asking people to rate the extent to which
the behavior accurately conveyed liking or disliking. Table 12-1 lists the behaviors
in order, rated highest and lowest. An actress then portrayed the narrowed list of
these behaviors in an interaction with a male, and the interaction was videotaped.
To no ones surprise, viewers of the tape felt that warm behaviors would elicit
greater liking from the male addressee. The interesting aspect of the studies is
what happened when viewers were exposed to a combined tape in which the
actresss behavior was initially warm but then turned cold, or when her behavior
was initially cold but then turned warm. The reactions to these videotapes were
compared with responses to videotapes showing totally warm or totally cold por-
trayals by the actress. Viewers thought the man on the videotape would be more
attracted to the woman who was cold at first and warm later than he would be to
the woman who was warm for the entire interaction. Further, people felt the
woman whose behavior turned from warm to cold was less attractive to the man
than the woman who was cold during the entire interaction. Why? It probably has
to do with the extent to which the judges felt the male had responsibility for the
females change in behavior.
Ironically, intimates in established romantic relationships may exhibit quantita-
tively less nonverbal behavior typically associated with affection and intimacy than
they did in forming the relationship. To establish these relationships usually means
CHAPTER 12 USING NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR IN DAILY INTERACTION 365
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a high frequency of hugs, kisses, handholding, and so forth; to maintain the rela-
tionship, though, it is often the quality of the act, not the frequency, that is impor-
tant. Perceived sincerity, magnitude of the expression, and perfect timing are
examples of qualitative factors. A hand held out to our significant other at just the
right moment after a fight may be the equivalent of 10 handholdings at an earlier
point in the relationship. The frequency of nonverbal acts of intimacy becomes
important in established relationships when it is necessary to offset a threat to the
relationship.
As close or intimate relationships develop, the nonverbal behavior we see is
likely to change. To communicate a wider range of emotional states, more facial
and vocal blends may occur. Sharply defined territories become more permeable.
Conventionally performed nonverbal acts gradually give way to performances
unique to friends or a couple. The increasing familiarity with auditory, visual, and
olfactory signals creates a condition for greater accuracy and efficiency in commu-
nicating; close female friends, for example, are better able to interpret each others
as opposed to a strangers low-intensity facial expressions of negative emotions
(Zhang & Parmley, 2011). More than acquaintances, intimates rely on a variety
of nonverbal signals to communicate the same message. Long-term intimates are
also subject to acquiring one anothers facial, postural, and gestural styles, making
them look more alike over time (Zajonc, Adelmann, Murphy, & Niedenthal,
1987). Intimacy brings with it exposure to more personal nonverbal acts and more
TABLE 12-1 BEHAVIORS RATED AS WARM AND COLD
Warm Behaviors Cold Behaviors
Looks into his eyes Gives a cold stare
Touches his hand Sneers
Moves toward him Gives a fake yawn
Smiles frequently Frowns
Works her eyes from his head to his toes Moves away from him
Has a happy face Looks at the ceiling
Smiles with mouth open Picks her teeth
Grins Shakes her head negatively
Sits directly facing him Cleans her fingernails
Nods head affirmatively Looks away
Puckers her lips Pouts
Licks her lips Chain smokes
Raises her eyebrows Cracks her fingers
Has eyes wide open Looks around the room
Uses expressive hand gestures while speaking Picks her hands
Gives fast glances Plays with her hairs split ends
Stretches Smells her hair
Source: Adapted from Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 43, p. 493, 1975. Copyright © 1975 by the
American Psychological Association. Adapted with permission.
366 PART V COMMUNICATING IMPORTANT MESSAGES
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talk about them. We would also expect more overt evaluationsthat is, approval
or disapproval of nonverbal behavioramong intimates than among acquaintances
(Knapp, 1983).
In the next section, we discuss how closeness or intimacy is created by the con-
tributions of both parties. Matching, or reciprocity, in established close relation-
ships has the potential to differ from reciprocity among strangers or
acquaintances. For example, people in established close relationships may not
reciprocate the same kind of behavior, only its equivalent. The extent to which the
behavior is equivalent to another is negotiated by the relationship partners. Thus,
almost any behavior can communicate intimacy in established relationships if the
partners to the relationship agree that it does. Intimates also may respond with
either compensation or reciprocity, but not in the same immediate time frame,
which is more likely with nonintimates.
MUTUAL INFLUENCE
Whatever nonverbal behavior is used to communicate liking or disliking is inevita-
bly the result of what both interactants do. This perspective prompted Argyle and
Dean to propose equilibrium theory in 1965, which maintains that interactants
seek an intimacy level comfortable for both of them. Eye gaze, proximity, smiling,
and topic intimacy, according to this theory, signal the degree of intimacy. If the
nonverbal behavior in one or more of these areas signals an increase or decrease
in intimacy, the other interactant compensates by engaging in behaviors necessary
to achieve equilibrium. For example, if a mere acquaintance looked at you too
much, stood too close, and talked to you about intimate topics, equilibrium theory
would predict that you would increase distance, look away, and try to change the
topic to something less intimate. Although some attempts to test this theory found
support for the predicted compensatory reactions, others found the opposite pat-
ternreciprocating changes in intimacy rather than offsetting them. This finding
led to Pattersons (1976) arousal-labeling model of interpersonal intimacy, which
maintained that gaze, touch, and proximity with another person creates arousal.
This arousal state is then labeled either positive or negative. If it is negativefor
example, dislike, embarrassment, or anxietythe reaction will be to compensate
or offset the behavior. If the arousal state is considered positive, as in liking, relief,
or love, the reaction will be matching behavior or reciprocity. Although this theory
explained why we sometimes compensate for, and sometimes reciprocate, the behav-
ior of our partner, it requires time-consuming cognitive labeling of behavior. In many
encounters, these changes are too quick to involve this kind of mental processing.
This consideration prompted Cappella and Greene (1982) to posit a discrepancy-
arousal theory. This model suggests we all have expectations about other peoples
expressive behavior. Increases and decreases in involvement by one person that vio-
late the other persons expectations will lead to arousal or cognitive activation. Mod-
erate arousal results from moderate discrepancies from what had been expected;
these are pleasurable, and reciprocity ensues. Large discrepancies from what had
been expected are highly arousing, leading to negative affective response and com-
pensation. Little or no discrepancy from expectations is not arousing, so we would
not expect to see any compensatory or reciprocal adjustments made.
CHAPTER 12 USING NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR IN DAILY INTERACTION 367
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Burgoon (1978) and her colleagues proposed and tested a model specifically
focused on one element of immediacy: proximity. Since then, this proximity model
of expectancy violation has also been used to study and predict involvement in gen-
eral (Burgoon & Hale, 1988; LePoire & Burgoon, 1994). This model is an impor-
tant contribution toward our understanding of reciprocal and compensatory
reactions, because it relies on both arousal and cognitive responses, and it expli-
cates the important role of how rewarding the communicator is perceived to be.
Burgoonsexpectancy-violations model posits that we all develop expectations
for appropriate proximity in conversations: from our culture, from our personal
experiences, and from our knowledge of specific interactants. When our expecta-
tions for proxemic immediacy are met, arousal is not likely to play an important
role. When violations occur, too far or too close, arousal is heightened, which
directs our attention to the nature of the interpersonal relationship. Interpretations
then are made that guide our response. Interpretations vary, according to
Burgoonswork,basedontheperceptionsofwhether the violator is rewarding. If
the person is rewardingthat is, if he or she has high credibility, high status, or offers
positive feedbackthe violation of expectations will be perceived more positively
than for nonrewarding interactants.
In an elaboration of the expectancy-violations model, Burgoon, Stern, and
Dillman (1995) proposed interaction adaptation theory. This theory assumes that
each interactant enters into a conversation with requirements, expectations, and
desires. Requirements are what we deem absolutely necessary, like being close
enough to hear someone. Expectations are what we anticipate happening based on
the norms, the people involved, and the situation. Desires are our personal goals
and preferences for the interaction. This combination of what is believed to be
needed, anticipated, and preferred is called an interaction position, and it is used
as the standard against which our interaction partners behavior is judged. When
our interaction partners behavior is closely aligned with our interaction position,
this theory predicts reciprocity of behavior. Reciprocity is also expected when our
partner engages in major deviations that are more positive than our interaction
position. However, major deviations by our interaction partner that are more nega-
tive than our interaction position are likely to make us respond with compensatory
behavior. In one study, romantic partners tended to reciprocate both increases
and decreases in immediacy behaviors from their partners (Guerrero, Jones, &
Burgoon, 2000). Compensating behavior with romantic partners who manifest
decreases in immediacy is most likely when there is a strong desire to change or
neutralize the partners decreased intimacy. Otherwise, there seems to be a natural
pull to match it. Keep in mind that interaction is an ongoing, sometimes rapidly
changing, process. For example, we may be surprised by a close friend who
engages in more immediacy behavior than we anticipated or desired, and we may
initially respond with compensatory behavior. But in a split second, our friend
observes our reaction, and he or she begins acting more in line with our expecta-
tions, preferences, and desires. Then our behavior becomes more reciprocal.
What are we to make of these theories that try to predict when we reciprocate
our partners behavior and when we engage in compensatory behavior? Obviously,
a simple bottom-line statement cannot take into account the many subtleties and
variations associated with every human transaction, but as a general rule of
368 PART V COMMUNICATING IMPORTANT MESSAGES
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thumb, we would do well to remember the following: With strangers and acquain-
tances, we tend to reciprocate or match their nonverbal behavior when it is per-
ceived as generally congruent with our expectations and involvement preferences
for that person in that situation. We tend to compensate or offset the nonverbal
behavior of strangers and acquaintances when it is perceived as a major violation
of our expectations and preferences for that person in that situation.
COMMUNICATING DOMINANCE AND STATUS
Tired of feeling weak and unimportant? Want to unlock the secrets of those who
have gained authority and power? Want to know how to dominate friends, ene-
mies, and business associates, with a few simple tips?
Sorry, but we cannot tell you how to do that, even though we can understand
the motivation behind the questions. For one, you are likely to feel more unsatis-
fied with an interaction when you have less as opposed to more power than the
other person (Dunbar & Abra, 2010). You can always turn to popular books on
nonverbal behavior for help. Some tips from these books include the following:
Put the desk between you and the person you wish to dominate. Position yourself
physically higher than the other. Sit in a relaxed posture, preferably with your
hands behind your head. Take up as much space as possible. Be sparing with your
smiles. Press your palms firmly downward on the table in front of you. Do not use
speedy or jerky gestures, and keep your thumbs sticking out when you put your
hands in your jacket pockets. Shake hands so your hand is on top of the other per-
sons hand. The list goes on. Although there could be a germ of truth to all of this,
as a general principle, you should be very skeptical of such glib advice. We can
summarize the research on dominance and nonverbal behavior for you, but there
are no pat answers. The desire for a simple how-to manual is great in this area,
yet the research is much too complex to allow it.
Even the basic concepts are complicated. The terms status,dominance, and
power are often used interchangeably, but many authors have noted their ambigui-
ties and have offered many, and sometimes contradictory, definitions (Burgoon &
Dunbar, 2006; Edinger & Patterson, 1983; Ellyson & Dovidio, 1985; Harper,
1985). Others have developed models in which some of these concepts, such as sta-
tus and dominance, are facets of another overarching interpersonal dimension, such
as power (Schmid Mast, 2010). Anyway, the concepts are certainly related, but not
perfectly: A figurehead leader has status without power, whereas a low-status
member of an organization may wield considerable influence by virtue of personal
contacts, shrewd insight, and social interaction skill.
A persons status, which may be detected in his or her nonverbal behavior
(Kraus & Keltner, 2009; Shariff & Tracy, 2009), often connotes a socially valued
quality that people carry with them into different situations and interactions,
whereas power and dominance are more likely to be situationally defined. But
dominance can also be seen as a personality trait expressed in nonverbal cues
(Bente, Leuschner, Al Issa, & Blascovich, 2010), in addition to a situational state
in people. The tendency to be subordinate also has been viewed as a stable trait
linked to nonverbal behaviors associated with a lack of confidence and submissive-
ness in men (Sturman, 2011), although situational factorssuch as being around
CHAPTER 12 USING NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR IN DAILY INTERACTION 369
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physically imposing malesmight prompt the very same behaviors in men who are
customarily dominant around others in day-to-day life. Some researchers would say
that any kind of aggressive act is dominant, but for others a behavior is dominant
only if it is followed by clear evidence of submission from another individual.
In research, many operational definitions have been used to represent these
various concepts. The following are some illustrations of different contexts in
which dominance may be considered:
Status: attire, occupation, education, military rank, socioeconomic status, role
Primacy: initiation of contacts, childrens attempts to gain precedence in play,
giving orders, boasts, not submitting to others, controlling othersbehaviors,
attacks
Power: control of resources, expertise, experience, autonomy
Other issues complicate this discussion, and these must be considered before
going further. One issue is whether nonverbal behaviors used to try to attain domi-
nance or status may be different from those used by someone who has already
achieved this goal (Argyle, 1988; Heslin & Patterson, 1982). Thus, acquiring and
expressing dominance may not involve the same cues. Recognition of this possibil-
ity may help us sort out contradictory results. For example, research finds that
more gazing is perceived as dominant, and people with more dominant personal-
ities, people who initiate speech more in groups, and people who attain higher
status in groups are also less likely to be the first to break a mutual gaze in
face-to-face interaction (Dovidio & Ellyson, 1985; Kleinke, 1986; Lamb, 1981;
Rosa & Mazur, 1979; Snyder & Sutker, 1977; Thayer, 1969). Many authors have
noted that gaze can carry connotations of threat and coercion, and it is often
assumed that higher levels of gazing are a hallmark of a dominant, powerful, or
high-status individual.
We might think everything adds uphigher status people gaze moreuntil we
also read that people with dependent personalities tend to gaze more, and that
people made to feel dependent gaze longer at an experimenter (Kleinke, 1986;
Mehrabian, 1972b; Nevill, 1974; Thayer, 1969). Henley (1977) even proposed that
the reason why women gaze at others more than men do is because low-power people
feel the need to monitor others by gazing at them. These apparent contradictions
may be reconciled if we consider that a person of high status or dominance may
feel either secure or defensive, and a person of lower status or dominance may be
struggling to gain status or may be signaling to more powerful others that he or
she is no threat to that powerful other. Nonverbal behaviors such as gaze that peo-
ple use in these different psychologically states could differ radically. For example,
the person who feels out of control but is striving to gain control might engage in
high levels of gaze, whereas the person who accepts a low-status role might avert
his or her eyes so as not to appear threatening. Gaze, touch, and most other non-
verbal behaviors take their meanings in a complex way from the situation and
other co-occurring nonverbal behaviors.
Another important issue to consider is the difference between the impression
made by a particular nonverbal behavior and the actual behavior of people having
different degrees of dominance, power, or status. Here are two examples of why
this perceived-versus-actual distinction matters: A nonsmiling face is sometimes
370 PART V COMMUNICATING IMPORTANT MESSAGES
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perceived as dominant (Keating, 1985), and seeing someone touch another raises
the viewers perception of the touchers dominance (Major & Heslin, 1982). But
these findings do not necessarily mean that dominant or high-status people actually
smile less and touch more. The evidence is mixed for both, with no overall trends
either way (Hall, 1996; Hall, Coats, & Smith LeBeau, 2005; Hall & Friedman,
1999; Johnson, 1994).
In general, people have well-developed beliefs about how nonverbal behavior is
related to dominance, status, or powerall of which we shall refer to as domi-
nance. Carney, Hall, and Smith LeBeau (2005) asked college students to imagine
interactions among people with differing degrees of dominance, including those
with either more or less dominant personalities and those with either more or less
status in the workplace. The more dominant person was believed to engage in more
invasivebehaviors, glare and gaze more, interrupt more, stand at a close distance,
touch the other more, touch themselves less, show emotions successfully, stand more
erect, and pay less attention to the other person, among many other perceived domi-
nance behaviors. Another way to examine peoples beliefs is to show them nonverbal
behavioron videotape, for exampleand ask them to rate how dominant the indi-
viduals seem to them. Many studies have done this, as reviewed by Hall, Coats, and
Smith LeBeau (2005). In general, the behaviors that are rated as more dominant con-
cur with those identified more explicitly in the Carney study.
However, for studies that related the expressorsactual degree of dominance to
their nonverbal behavior, many fewer relations were found on average (Hall,
Coats, & Smith LeBeau, 2005). High actual dominance was associated with more
facial expressiveness, more bodily openness, smaller interpersonal distances, better
posed expression skill, less vocal variability, louder voices, more interruptions,
fewer back-channel responses, fewer filled pauses, and a more relaxed-sounding
voice. At the same time, many other behaviors that are generally believed to be
related to dominance were not observed. Furthermore, studies vary greatly in how
nonverbal behavior is related to dominance and power, sometimes showing diamet-
rically opposite effects. This complex picture may have something to do with the
fact that high and low dominance can have many different emotions and motives
associated with it. Considering this, it may not make much sense to seek nonverbal
cues that are consistently correlated with a persons dominance. For example, a
person low in dominance who is feeling hostile would smile a very different
amount from a low-dominant person who is feeling the need to please another per-
son. Also the nonverbal behaviors themselves can have ambiguous meanings, and
therefore, it is risky to label a particular behavior as being intrinsically, or always,
dominant or nondominant. For instance, although interrupting others in conversa-
tion can be a dominant behavior (Henley, 1977; Kollock, Blumstein, & Schwartz,
1985; Leffler, Gillespie, & Conaty, 1982; Robinson & Reis, 1989), one should
not take this interpretation for granted. Interruption is sometimes indicative of a
highly involved and participatory conversation and is not necessarily a sign of a
power struggle in progress (Dindia, 1987; Kennedy & Camden, 1983).
Another factor is that peoples expectations will influence how they interpret
dominance cues. In any encounter, a host of expectations is usually going to be
present, including role and gender expectations. Sometimes these expectations will
mesh well with each other; at other times, they will not. Schmid Mast, Hall,
CHAPTER 12 USING NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR IN DAILY INTERACTION 371
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Cronauer, and Cousin (2011) observed that similar nonverbal and verbal behaviors
were seen as indicators of more dominance in female physicians than in male phy-
sicians. Dominance-related behaviors that are in line with our role expectations of
physicians, such as talking more and speaking with a louder voice, might also be
more in line with our gender role expectations of men than women. Therefore,
observers might conclude that their presence is more diagnostic of high levels of
dominance in female physicians than in male physicians because such cues may be
not expected as much from females than males.
One behavior that has consistently been associated with dominance is the
visual dominance ratio (Ellyson, Dovidio, & Fehr, 1981; Exline, Ellyson, & Long,
1975). Experiments that defined status, power, and dominance in different ways
found that among white college students, the higher status person gazes roughly
the same percentage of the time while listening and speaking, whereas the lower
status person gazes relatively more while listening. When a male and a female inter-
act, and one is made to be the expert or is accorded higher status, that individual,
regardless of sex, will engage in the visual dominance pattern. Although subtle, the
visual dominance ratio does not go unnoticed. When subjects were asked to judge
the relative power or potency of individuals engaging in different amounts of eye
gaze, they gave higher ratings to individuals engaging in relatively more looking
while speaking than to those engaging in relatively more looking while listening.
How much a person talks when in a group is also a very consistent and rather
strong indicator of status or dominance, both in terms of observersperceptions
and in terms of actual status or dominance (Schmid Mast, 2002). However, even
here there are exceptions. In an interview situation, the interviewee (lower power)
is likely to talk more than the interviewer (higher power). And in long-standing
groups, sometimes a person with well-established status or power can afford to sit
back and say very little, knowing that others will attend fully whenever he or she
chooses to speak.
Murphy, Driscoll, and Kelly (1999) connected nonverbal dominance to the
likelihood that college males would engage in sexual harassment. These authors
found that males who scored higher on a scale that had previously been shown to
predict sexual harassment engaged in several behaviors that people believe to be
related to dominance: more open body postures, more direct eye contact, and less
direct body orientation. However, nonverbal behaviors that might be construed as
sexualsmiling, head tilting, and flirtatious glanceswere not predicted by the
scale, leading the authors to conclude that sexual harassment is more dominance
related than sexuality related.
The relations of nonverbal behavior to dominance have been helpfully summa-
rized by Burgoon and Dunbar (2006) in three major categories: effects of physical
potency and energy (size and strength, expressivity), resource control (command of
space, spatial precedencewho goes first), and interaction control (centrality, phys-
ical elevation, initiation, and nonreciprocation). Many findings from the literature,
including many more not mentioned here, fit within this framework. However, one
must remember that the relation of nonverbal communication to dominance is
complex and does not lend itself to simple, formulaic approaches. Perhaps this is
fortunate, in that it would be troubling if it were truly easy to dominate others
through nonverbal behavior.
372 PART V COMMUNICATING IMPORTANT MESSAGES
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MANAGING THE INTERACTION
Most of the time, we do not engage in much conscious thinking about how to greet
people, request a speaking turn, show our conversational partner we believe what
he or she was saying, or say good-bye. We do these things to structure the interac-
tionto regulate the processes of coming together, the back-and-forth nature of
speaking and listening, and departure. As we note later, however, these acts are
also rich in content. When such acts are the subject of conscious reflection, we
appreciate the importance of the messages involved.
GREETING BEHAVIOR
Greetings perform a regulatory function by signaling the beginning of an interac-
tion. Greetings also do much more: They convey information about the relation-
ship, reduce uncertainties, signal ways to better know the other, and structure the
ensuing dialogue. Some greeting behavior follows certain conventions, like the
handshake, but greetings take many forms. This was not true, however, in
Germany in the 1930s, when the Hitler salutewas imposed on the German people.
This form of greeting was designed to signal one thing above all elsethe greeters
willingness to follow the Nazi partys rules. It was the expected greeting in every-
day administrative, commercial, political, and social situations, and it was taught
to children at an early age (see Figure 12-3). The salute was a salute to Hitler,
so it played no role in establishing a connection between the interacting parties.
FIGURE 12-3
Children performing the Nazi salute.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
CHAPTER 12 USING NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR IN DAILY INTERACTION 373
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Allert (2008) argues convincingly that it wounded the sociability and connectedness
among Germans of that era.
Without the imposition of any particular convention like the Hitler salute, ver-
bal and nonverbal behavior during greetings may signal status differences, such as
those between a subordinate and supervisor; degree of intimacy, as between
acquaintance and lover; or a current feeling or attitude, such as aversion or inter-
est. An emotionally charged greeting may reflect our desired involvement with the
other person, or it may reflect a long absence of contact. Goffman (1971) proposed
an attenuation rule,which states that the expansiveness of a greeting with a par-
ticular person will gradually subside with continual contact with that person, for
example, a coworker at an office. Kendon and Ferber (1973) found the following
six stages that characterized greetings initiated from a distance.
1. Sighting, orientation, and initiation of the approach. A greeting, like any other
transaction, requires participation by both interactants. Sometimes both will
agree that acknowledgment is enough. After mutual recognition, an immediate
and sustained withdrawal of attention occurs. Goffman (1963) called this
common action civil inattention. When the greeting continues, we move to
stage 2.
2. The distant salutation. This is the official ratificationthat a greeting
sequence has been initiated and who the participants are. A wave, smile, or
call may be used for recognition. Two types of head movements were noted at
this point: One, the head toss, is a fairly rapid back-and-forward tilting
motion. In the other, the person tended to lower the head, hold it for a while,
and then slowly raise it.
3. The head dip. Researchers have noted this movement in other contexts as a
marker for transitions between activities or shifts in psychological orientation.
Interestingly, this movement was not observed by Kendon and Ferber if the
greeter did not continue to approach his or her partner.
4. Approach. As the greeting parties continued to move toward each other, sev-
eral behaviors were observed. Gazing behavior probably helped signal that the
participants were cleared for talking. An aversion of this gaze was seen just
prior to the close salutation stage, however. Grooming behavior and one or
both arms moved in front of the body were also observed at this point.
5. Final approach. Participants at this stage are less than 10 feet from each other.
Mutual gazing, smiling, and a positioning of the head not seen in the sequence
thus far are now seen. The palms of the hands may also be turned toward the
other person.
6. Close salutation. As the participants negotiate a standing position, we hear the
more stereotyped, ritualistic verbalizations so characteristic of the greeting cer-
emony: Hey, Steve! How ya doin?and so on. If the situation calls for body
contacthandshakes, embraces, and the likethese will occur at this time.
Even though the handshake is very common in the United States, this kind of
greeting behavior is not shared in some other cultures.
The specific nature of greetings varies according to the relationship of the com-
municators, the setting, and the attendant verbal behavior. Our major concern here
is with the nonverbal behavior. The greetings observed by Krivonos and Knapp
374 PART V COMMUNICATING IMPORTANT MESSAGES
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(1975) were frequently initiated by a vertical or sideways motion of the head
accompanied by eye gaze. Smiles, regardless of the degree of acquaintanceship,
were also common. Perhaps the smile serves the function of setting a positive,
friendly initial mood. Eye gaze signals that the communication channels are open
and that an obligation to communicate exists. Other eye-related greeting behaviors
included winks and the eyebrow flash (discussed in Chapter 2). The hands are
often active in the greeting process with salutes, waves, handshakes (Schiffrin,
1974), handslaps, and various emblematic gestures such as the peace sign, the
raised fist, or the thumbs-up gesture. Hands used in greetings have traditionally
been open, but in recent years, the fist bumphas been used by some in the
United States. When fists lightly touch each other in greeting, the greeters are sig-
naling friendliness by showing that a potentially threatening gesture is being used
in a nonthreatening way. Hands also may be engaged in grooming, such as running
fingers through the hair. Touching may take the form of embraces, kisses, or hit-
ting on the hands or arm. The mouth may smile or assume an oval shape, suggest-
ing a possible readiness for talk.
TURN-TAKING BEHAVIOR
Conversations begin and are eventually terminated. Between these two points,
however, it is necessary to exchange speaking and listening roles, that is, to take
turns. Without much awareness of what we are doing, we use body movements,
vocalizations, and some verbal behavior that often seem to accomplish this turn-
taking with surprising efficiency. The act of smoothly exchanging speaking and lis-
tening turns is an extension of our discussion of interaction synchrony in Chapter 7.
And, because a number of the turn-taking cues are visual, it is understandable that
we might have a harder time synchronizing our exchanges during telephone and
intercom conversations.
Turn-taking behavior is not just an interesting curiosity of human behavior.
We seem to base important judgments about others on how the turns are allocated
and how smoothly exchanges are accomplished. Effective turn-taking may elicit the
perception that you and your partner really hit it off, or that your partner is a very
competent communicator; ineffective turn-taking may prompt evaluations of
rude(too many interruptions), dominating(not enough turn yielding), or
frustrating(the inability to discern turn-taking cues).
The turn-taking behaviors we are about to outline have generally been derived
from analyses of adult, white, and middle- and upper-class interactants. Some of
these behaviors and behavior sequences may not apply to other groups. Blacks,
for example, seem to gaze less than whites during interaction (Halberstadt, 1985).
Other groups may develop speaking patterns with more unfilled pauses, which
may communicate turn yielding to those unfamiliar with the group norm. Children
who are learning turn-taking rules engage in behaviors we rarely see in adults, such
as tugging at their parents clothing and hand raising to request a speaking turn.
Speakers and listeners negotiate behaviors associated with turn-taking, but
speakers typically take the most responsibility for signaling two turn-taking beha-
viors: turn yielding and turn maintaining. Listeners typically take the most respon-
sibility for two other types of turn-taking behaviors: turn requesting and turn
CHAPTER 12 USING NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR IN DAILY INTERACTION 375
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denying. The behaviors associated with these acts are derived from careful analyses
of both audio and visual elements enacted at junctures where interactants exchange
or maintain the speaking turn (Duncan, 1975; Duncan & Fiske, 1977; Wiemann &
Knapp, 1975; Wilson, Wiemann, & Zimmerman, 1984). Any individual behavior
associated with speaker or listener intentions will contribute toward a smooth turn
exchange, but the greater the number of signals, the greater the chances for a
smooth exchange. Note, however, that a familiarity with the rules of interaction is
also an important part of effective turn-taking. For example, before any specific
turn-taking behaviors are observed, most people enter conversations knowing that
speaking roles will generally alternate in an A-B-A-B sequence, and that when one
person finishes speaking, the other is generally obligated to take the conversational
ball.Cultures with different conversational rules and specialized systems of com-
munication, such as sign language, require somewhat different turn-exchange pro-
cesses, although congenitally blind and adventitiously blind communicators also
display a range of vocal and bodily behaviors associated with conversational turn-
taking (Magnusson, 2006).
TURN YIELDING To yield in conversation literally means you are giving up your turn
and you expect the other person to start talking. As noted in Chapter 7, the termi-
nation of onesutterancecanbecommunicatedwithkinesicmarkers(seeFigure7-14)
that rise or fall with the speakers pitch level. Questions are clearly an indication
that a speaker is yielding his or her turn and expects the partner to respond. If it
is a rhetorical question the speaker plans to answer, we probably will see some
turn-maintaining cues, but if the listener is eager to get into the conversation, he or
she may attempt to answer even a rhetorical question. Vocally, we also can indicate
the end of our utterance by a decreased loudness, a slowed tempo, a drawl on the
last syllable, or an utterance trailer such as you know,”“or something,or but,
uh.Naturally, an extended, unfilled pause also is used to signal turn yielding.
More often than not, however, the silence becomes awkward, and the speaker adds
a trailer onto the utterance. Body movements that have been accompanying the
speech may also be terminated; for example, illustrative gestures come to rest, and
body tenseness becomes relaxed. Gazing at the other person will also help signal
the end of an utterance. If the listener does not perceive these yielding cues, and
gives no turn-denying cues, the speaker may try to convey more explicit cues, such
as touching the other, raising and holding the eyebrows in expectation, or saying
something like Well?
TURN MAINTAINING If, for some reason, the speaker does not want to yield a speak-
ing turn, we are likely to see several behaviors. Voice loudness probably will
increase as turn-requesting signals are perceived in the listener. Gestures probably
will not come to rest at the end of the verbal utterances, creating a gestural equiv-
alent to the filled pause. Filled pauses probably will increase while the frequency
and duration of silent pauses decrease. This minimizes the opportunities for the
other person to start speaking without interrupting or to start speaking simulta-
neously. Sometimes we see a light touching of the other person by the speaker,
which seems to say, Hold on a little bit longer. I want to make a few more points
and then you can talk.This touching is sometimes accompanied by a patting
376 PART V COMMUNICATING IMPORTANT MESSAGES
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motion, as if to soothe the impatient listener. In some respects, this touch has the
effect of the speaker putting his or her hand over the mouth of the would-be
speakeran act not allowed in interpersonal etiquette in our society.
TURN REQUESTING When we do not have the floor and we want to talk, we may
exhibit one or more of several behaviors. An upraised index finger seems to sym-
bolize an instrument for creating a conversational hole in the speakers stream of
words, but it also approximates a familiar, formal turn-requesting signal learned
in schoola raised hand. Sometimes this upraised index finger is accompanied by
an audible inspiration of breath and a straightening and tightening of posture, sig-
naling the imminence of speech. In some cases, certain self-adaptors classified as
preening behavior also may signal preparation for a new role. The very act of
simultaneous talkingthat is, an extended interruptionwill convey your request
for a speaking turn, but to make sure that request is granted, you have to speak
louder than your partner, begin gesturing, and look away as if the turn were now
yours. When the speaker and listener are well synchronized, the listener will antici-
pate the speakers juncture for yielding and will prepare accordingly by getting the
rhythm before the other person has stopped talking, much like a musician tapping
his or her foot preceding a solo performance. If the requestors rhythm does not fit
the speakers rhythm, we might observe some stutter startsfor example, I
II was.Sometimes the turn-requesting mechanism consists of efforts to
speed up the speaker, realizing that the sooner one speaker has his or her say, the
sooner the requestor will get his or hers. This same behavior was noted when peo-
ple were anxious to terminate a conversation (Knapp, Hart, Friedrich, & Shulman,
1973). The most common method for encouraging a speaker to finish quickly is
the use of rapid head nods, often accompanied by verbalizations of pseudo agree-
ment such as yeahand mmm-hmm.The requestor hopes the speaker will
perceive that these comments are being given much too often, and do not follow
ideas expressed logically enough, to be genuine signs of reinforcement.
TURN DENYING Sometimes we receive turn-yielding cues from the speaker, but we
do not want to talk. At such times, we probably maintain a relaxed listening
pose, maintain silence, or gaze intently at something in the surrounding environ-
ment. More often, we exhibit behavior that shows our continuing involvement in
the content of the speakers words but denies we are seeking a turn. This might
take the form of smiling, nodding, or shaking the head; completing a sentence
started by the speaker; briefly restating what the speaker just said; briefly request-
ing clarification of the speakers remarks; or showing approval by appropriately
placed mmm-hmms,”“yeahs,or other noises such as the clickingsound
that suggests You shouldnt have said that.
The preceding repertoire of turn-taking behaviors is accurate as far as it goes,
but it can be more complicated. As we noted earlier, the exchange of turns in con-
versation is a jointly negotiated process and not merely the display of one or more
signals associated with yielding, maintaining, requesting, or denying. Sometimes, it
is hard to tell who is playing the speaker role and who is playing the listener. For
example, before a listener displays any requesting behavior, a speaker may provide
signals that essentially project the completion of his or her turn, thereby
CHAPTER 12 USING NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR IN DAILY INTERACTION 377
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acknowledging a request before it has occurred. Sometimes a listener uses gestures
that simultaneously signal the desire for a turn, project the type of talk to ensue,
and avoid disrupting the speakers turn.
Many of the actions listeners perform during a speakers turn are called back-
channel responses or feedback (Duncan, 1974; Rosenfeld, 1987; Rosenfeld &
Hancks, 1980). These listener responses help regulate the flow of information and
signal the energy expended in the decoding process. Listener responses can affect
the type and amount of information given by the speaker, the length of his or her
turn, the clarity of the speakers content, and the extent to which the speaker com-
municates in a qualified or specific manner. At key points in the telling of a story, a
speaker will look into the face of his or her listeneran act that is likely to pro-
duce a back-channel response such as a nod or an mmm-hmmfrom the listener
(Bavelas, Coates, & Johnson, 2002). Back-channel responses by the listener nor-
mally occur at the juncture of phonemic clauses by the speaker. The primary non-
verbal signals are head nods, but postural changes, smiles, frowns, eyebrow flashes,
and laughter (Vettin & Todt, 2004) also occur. Common verbal and vocal back-
channel signals include saying yeah,”“mmm-hmm,repeating the speakers
words, asking a clarifying question, or completing a sentence for the speaker.
Sometimes the listener provides these signals prior to the phonemic clause juncture,
which may indicate he or she is aheadof the speaker. When such signals are
late,it is acknowledgment of what is being said but may also indicate a lack of
full understanding. Once again, though, back-channel cues only affect the speaker
if he or she is both motivated to attend to them and motivated to act on the feed-
back given.
LEAVE-TAKING BEHAVIOR
Having managed our way through the conversation thus far, it is now time to ter-
minate it. Leave taking seems to serve three valuable functions in daily interaction
(Knapp, Hart, Friedrich, & Shulman, 1973). The primary regulatory function is
signaling the end of the interaction; that is, immediate physical and/or vocal con-
tact soon will be terminated. Again, specific nonverbal manifestations of these func-
tions vary with the relationship between the communicators, preceding dialogue,
anticipated time of separation, body positionthat is, whether the communicators
are standing or sittingand other factors. Decreasing eye gaze and positioning
ones body toward the nearest exit were the two most frequent nonverbal beha-
viors observed in this study, and these seem to adequately signal impending
absence. Leave-taking rituals may also summarize the substance of the discourse.
This is usually accomplished verbally, but a good-night kiss may sufficiently cap-
ture the evenings pleasantries to qualify as a summarizer. Finally, departures tend
to signal supportiveness, which can offset any negativity that might arise from
encounter-termination signals, while simultaneously setting a positive mood for the
next encounterthat is, it sends the message: Our conversation has ended, but
our relationship has not.Nonverbal supportiveness may be found in a smile, a
handshake, touch, head nodding, and leaning forward. Because signaling support-
iveness seems so important, we often use the more direct verbal signals, for exam-
ple, Thanks for your time. Im glad we got a chance to talk.
378 PART V COMMUNICATING IMPORTANT MESSAGES
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Head nodding and leaning forward, of course, serve several simultaneous func-
tions. Rapid head nodding toward the end of a conversation reinforces what the
speaker is saying, but it is a rather empty reinforcement, because it also signals a
desire to terminate the conversation. After all, if there is no apparent disagreement
or lack of understanding, the speaker will feel no need to expand on his or her
remarks. And although it is true that people accompany their feelings of liking by
sometimes leaning toward another person, it is also necessary to lean forward to
stand up in order to exit. So, like words, movements have multiple meanings and
serve several functions.
Other nonverbal leave-taking behaviors include looking at a watch; placing the
hands on the thighs for leverage in getting up, which also signals the other person
that such a catapultis imminent; gathering possessions together in an orderly
fashion; and accenting the departure ritual with nonvocal sounds, such as slapping
the thighs when rising, stomping the floor with the feet when rising, or tapping a
desk or wall with the knuckles or palm. Finally, researchers noticed that nearly all
the nonverbal variables studied tended to increase in frequency during the last min-
ute of interaction, with a peak during the 15 seconds just prior to standing. This
increasing activity in at least 10 body areas just prior to the termination of an
interaction may suggest why we are so frustrated when our partings fail,that is,
when our partner calls us back with Oh, just one more thing .It means
we have to go through the entire process of leave taking all over again.
COMMUNICATING OUR IDENTITY
The evening news shows a group of men entering a building. The narrator tells us
that a fugitive sought in several states has been apprehended by the FBI. But did we
need to be told? Even without the narrative, we can tell a great deal about the peo-
ple and what is going on. The bearing and demeanor of some of the men have
federal agentwritten all over them. They are likely to be large and burly and to
wear their hair conservatively short and keep their faces closely shaved; sunglasses
might be worn, and the attire is undistinguished but is likely to be a plain, dark
business suit. They do not smileindeed, they look completely humorless, erect,
and controlling. How about behavior of the suspected criminal? That persons pos-
ture is likely to be slumped, head bowed, the face wearing a dismal expression,
with eyes averted from the camera.
The point of this mental exercise is that appearance and behavior reveal signif-
icant information about peoples identitieswho they are, or in many cases, who
they would like to be. Identity includes social attributes, personalities, and those
attitudes and roles people regard as self-defining. Thus, being a police officer is a
role likely to be deeply connected to a persons self-definition, and portraying that
identity appropriately is likely to be important to the person who identifies with
that role. Being an arrested suspect is a more fleeting role but could be integral to
the self-concept in the case of a career criminal. Sometimes it is hard to tell when
behavior reflects transient emotions and roles or is reflecting a more enduring and
deeply felt identity.
People have a great need to convey their identities. In previous chapters, evi-
dence was presented showing how aspects of our identity (e.g., age, sexual
CHAPTER 12 USING NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR IN DAILY INTERACTION 379
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orientation, occupation, socioeconomic status, culture, personality, psychopathol-
ogy, and criminality) are evident in our dress, physical appearance, and nonverbal
behavior. The communication of identity is, in part, self-validating: We confirm
for ourselves who we are. We also show our identities for the benefit of others
both those in our group, to build solidarity and to signal belonging, and those not
in our group, to emphasize that they are not one of us. Michael Argyle has sug-
gested that people want to know about otherssocial attributes partly to help
maintain the belief that the world is a predictable place. Clues to anothers identity
also help us decide how to act toward that person. But direct, concrete evidence of
othersidentities is sometimes hard to come by, so people rely on cues and gestures
(Argyle, 1988). And these cues are beneficial, for we are surprisingly accurate at
judging important components of other peoples identities. In the case of social
class, for example, a persons way of dressing tells a great deal, as do other accou-
trements such as pens, briefcases, hairstyles, makeup, and jewelry. Sometimes peo-
ple orchestrate these aspects of their material selves to present an improved version
of the self in the hope of winning acceptance or approval.
PERSONAL IDENTITY
The concept of identity can be construed at both the personal and social levels. Per-
sonal identity consists of a unique configuration of characteristicspersonality,
attitudes, tastes, values, and featuresthat the individual perceives as personally
defining. Nonverbal styles of expression can also be so distinctive that they become
an aspect of identity. Davis and Dulicai (1992) provided an analysis of Adolf
Hitlers movements and gestural mannerisms during public appearances. Some of
Hitlers movements included finger wagging (the scolding Dutch uncle), forward
stabs, pounding, slicing, crushing fists, and snapping punches, all of which are per-
formed with extreme control and inward stress. Davis and Dulicai summarize the
uniqueness of Hitlers movement style as follows:
Hitlers movement is very difficult to imitate. In seminars with people who are sophis-
ticated about movement analysis and performance such as dancers and dance thera-
pists, most cannot even approximate the ways in which he controls the action and
sustains such a violent intensity throughout a series of batons (pointing gestures).
Those who come close want to stop. It is tortured, painful, relentless, and unyielding
motion. To move this way is to be at war with ones body and it is notable that, for all
of the aggression that Hitlers oratory displays, it is this war with himself that stands
out. (p. 161)
Personality is one of the ways we define personal identity, and personality is fairly
consistent across situations and time. Aspects of personality may be associated
with various appearance-related cues or behavioral cues that are apparent to
others. We understand that some people are more susceptible to criminal behavior
than others. It has been theorized that the male sex hormone, androgens, may play
a role in criminality due to its effects on brain development (Ellis, 2003). Impor-
tantly, androgens affect physical development, too, leading to the possibility that
there may be appearance-related cues that suggest a high level of exposure to
androgens, and thus, a greater susceptibility to criminal, especially violent, conduct.
Indeed, Ellis, Das, and Buker (2008) found that self-reports of violent criminality
380 PART V COMMUNICATING IMPORTANT MESSAGES
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were related to more masculine mannerisms and bodily features, a deeper voice,
and more body hair among college-aged males and females. Nonverbal behaviors
also provide clues to aspects of a persons personality. Stillman and Maner (2009),
for example, found that the eyebrow flashes and glances toward a male confederate
were valid cues of a womans sociosexual orientation (i.e., how much emotional
commitment she needs before engaging in sexual activity, from a little to a lot).
An important question is how beliefs about behavior-trait associations differ
from the actual associations. People may have beliefs that are not substantiated
when observational research is done. A useful way of conceptualizing this question
is the lens model,which we have mentioned in other chapters. As shown in
Figure 12-4, the lens model encompasses the relation of both perceived and actual
behavior to a criterion, such as a personality trait, as well as the relation between
the perceived and actual traitthat is, the degree to which observers can judge
which targets have the trait in question.
Table 12-2 summarizes the lens-model results of Giffords (1994) study of 60
undergraduates videotaped in conversation. Over 20 nonverbal behaviors were
coded from these tapes and then related to both the participantsself-descriptions
of personality and the impressions of personality made by observers who watched
the tapes with the sound turned off. Table 12-2 shows that for the trait
ambitious-dominant,there were associations between nonverbal behaviors and
the personality ratings made by observers. However, actual ambition-
dominancethat is, the self-ratings by those who appeared on the tapesrelated
to fewer behaviors, only two of which appeared on the list of behaviors correlated
with observersratings. This suggests that observers, who were also college stu-
dents, had a correct naive theory as far as these two cues were concerned but held
misconceptions for all the others shown on the other side of the table; in other
words, they thought that the more ambitious-dominant people would display these
cues, but they were wrong. The observers did, however, extract enough information to
form a significantly accurate overall impression of the targetsambition-dominance;
A
BC
Stimulus Quality 5
Stimulus Quality 4
Stimulus Quality 3
Stimulus Quality 2
Stimulus Quality 1
Personality
Judgment
Personality
FIGURE 12-4
A diagram of a judgment lens model of social perception.
© Cengage Learning All Rights Reserved
CHAPTER 12 USING NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR IN DAILY INTERACTION 381
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possibly, they based their impression on additional cues that were not measured, as
well as the two they used correctly. Other lens-model studies relating a wide array of
nonverbal cues to perceived and actual personality traits have been done by Berry
and Hansen (2000), Borkenau and Liebler(1995),Lippa(1998),andMurphy,Hall,
and Colvin (2003).
Another characteristic central to our identity is our sense of how intelligent we
are. There can be no doubt that intelligence, and the perception thereof, is a thing
of abiding importance to people in modern society. All of us have at some point,
and perhaps often, worried about how we compare to others in intelligence and in
other characteristics that are related, or perceived to be relatedSAT scores, col-
leges attended, and so onand whether others will think we are as smart as we
would like them to. In daily life, we do a great deal of assessing othersintelligence
as well as projecting our own as we would like others to see it.
Murphy, Hall, and Colvin (2003) asked what cues people look for when judg-
ing othersintelligence and whether those cues are correct. When making intelli-
gence ratings based on 1-minute clips of conversational behavior, perceivers
associated many cues with higher intelligence, including having a pleasant speech
style, talking with the hands, sitting up straight, talking fast, looking at the other
person while speaking, and behaving in a responsive manner. However, only a
few of these were valid cues to higher intelligence, most notably looking more at
the other person while speaking.
SOCIAL IDENTITY
Race and gender are among the most salient aspects of social identitythat is, our
identification with social and cultural groupsso it is not surprising that research
has turned up nonverbal communication differences associated with these catego-
ries. It is, of course, an oversimplification to think of these categories as though
everyone in them behaves the same. Stereotypic thinking promotes many judgment
errors and undesirable behaviors. Obviously, a woman/man may express her/his
womanhood/manhood differently at home than at the officelet us hope they do.
Similarly, a minority student may have a different behavior style when with friends
TABLE 12-2 PERCEIVED AND ACTUAL CORRELATES OF AMBITION-DOMINANCE
Correlated with Perceived
Trait Only
Correlated with Both
Perceived Trait and
Actual Trait
Correlated with
Actual Trait Only
Head, trunk, and legs more
directly facing another
More gestures More leg lean
Head more tilted back Legs more extended Less object manipulation
Arms less wrapped
More self-touching
More headshaking
Source: Adapted from R. Gifford (1994), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66, p. 401.
382 PART V COMMUNICATING IMPORTANT MESSAGES
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of the same social group than in a classroom filled with students from the majority
group. Also remember that distinctions such as male or female and black or white
are often confounded with other distinctions, such as social class and status. Fur-
thermore, each individual has numerous social identities: a person might be a
woman and a Hispanic and a member of the middle class. Furthermore, each cate-
gory of social identity is often multidimensional and ambiguous. Many people can-
not easily describe the complexity of their racial, ethnic, and gender identities.
Thus, it can be unclear what identity factors explain a given nonverbal behavior.
At various places in this book, we have documented differences between the non-
verbal behavior of blacks and whites in the United States. Although such differences in
nonverbal behavior have not been studied extensively, there appear to be differences
at least in the limited populations observedin style of walking, interpersonal dis-
tance, orientation, gaze, and conversational regulators (Burgoon, Buller, & Woodall,
1989; Halberstadt, 1985; Johnson, 1972). It is important to note that some of the
findings may pertain only to subgroups and not to the larger group, and some findings
may change over time. For example, a distinctive walk that may be evident in urban
black teenagers is probably not the same walk that would characterize black school-
teachers or executives. Keeping this in mind, research suggests that among adults, the
distance maintained between interactants is typically greater, and the body orientation
less direct, among African Americans than among European Americans. As an inter-
esting contradiction to this pattern of reduced sensory involvement, studies have
found African Americans to touch more than European Americans do.
Some research suggests that African Americans gaze less than European
Americans during conversation and gaze especially little with authorities, whereas
among European Americans, gaze often increases with authorities. Ericksons
(1979) analysis of films of conversations pointed to distinct African-American and
European-American norms for conversational turn-taking and signaling attention.
African-American speakers used less subtle and less frequent cues indicating that a
listener should give a listener response,a signal that the listener is paying atten-
tion. But, as listeners, African Americans employed listener responses that were
more subtle and likely to be missed by a speaker from outside that group. Erickson
suggested that these differences could lead to a situation in which a European-
American speaker concludes an African-American interactant is either not listening
or not understanding. The European American then repeats himself, which is
perceived as talking downby the African American. Although Erickson found
evidence that African-American subjects displayed bicultural competence, a kind of
nonverbal bilingualism, there remained differences in conversational behavior.
In mixed-racial interactions, each person may deliberatively or unwittingly
communicate his or her racial identity to the other. A persons choice of clothes or
hairstyle may signal his or her identification with a particular racial group, whereas
his or her interpersonal distance to another may be done out of force of habit. Peo-
ple may use such cues to categorize others into a specific racial group. Their non-
verbal reactions to such categorizations may betray their attitude or unease
toward members of that racial group (Word, Zanna, & Cooper, 1974). Toosi,
Babbitt, Ambady, and Sommers (2012) examined over 40 yearsworth of research
on same- and mixed-racial (generally black and white) interactions and found that
individuals tended to show more friendly nonverbal behavior toward each other
CHAPTER 12 USING NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR IN DAILY INTERACTION 383
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when they were interacting with a member of their own (versus a different) racial
group. The more negative-looking behaviors in cross-race interactions often have
ambiguous meaning, alternatively as reflections of bad feeling or as reflections of
uncertainty and anxiety. Fortunately, attitudes toward other racial groups can
improve via greater interracial contact, and thus signs of nonverbal unease or neg-
ativity have and hopefully will continue to decrease over time.
Gender differences in nonverbal behavior also reflect the different identities of
males and females, and nonverbal differences appear early in life. Gender roles are
collections of attitudes, behaviors, and traits deemed desirable for each sex. In our
society, the male gender role, in stereotype, is exemplified by autonomy, assertive-
ness, dominance, and task orientation; for women, gentleness, empathy, and inter-
personal orientation are stereotypical (Cross & Madson, 1997). To a great extent,
nonverbal differences correspond to these role prescriptions. It is clear even from
everyday observation that social displays of sexual identity and gender role have
special importance. Thus, we may want to show the world not only that we are
men or women but that we behave as men or women are expected to behave. We
discuss some of the findings from research next, and other differences have been
discussed earlier in the book. Compared to women, men:
Have less skill in sending and receiving nonverbal, especially emotional, cues
Are less likely to notice or to be influenced by peoples appearance and non-
verbal behavior
Have less expressive faces and use fewer expressive gestures
Smile and laugh less
Look at others less
Keep greater distances from others
The nature of gender differences in interpersonal touching has sparked much
debate. When it comes to same-gender touch, the evidence is rather clear that het-
erosexual men are particularly averse to touching other men, except in certain pre-
scribed settings such as team sports, both as part of the game and as expressions of
team spirit. Both self-reported and observational data indicate that same-gender
touching is avoided by men, at least in the United States, but is quite welcome by
women. One hypothesis for mens avoidance is homophobic attitudes and the fear
that touching will be seen as homosexual. This might explain why they are less
likely to comply with the request of a man who has touched them (Dolinski,
2010). Moreover, research by Roese, Olson, Borenstein, Martin, and Shores
(1992) found that among men, those with the least stated liking for same-gender
touching had the highest scores on a homophobia scale with items such as Homo-
sexuality is a sin and just plain wrongand Homosexual behavior disgusts me.
In a second study, college students who were observed to engage in less same-
gender touching in a cafeteria had stronger homophobic attitudes when surveyed
by researchers, and this was found to be true for both men and women.
Studies on opposite-gender touching have been more widely debated (Henley,
1977; Stier & Hall, 1984), but there is some concurrence that when the individuals
are young adults, or the touch is with the hand, or the arm is put around the other
person, males do take the touching initiative. However, the woman is more likely
to touch the man than vice versa when the couple is in their 40s or older, when
384 PART V COMMUNICATING IMPORTANT MESSAGES
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the touch is either brief or involves linking arms or handholding (Hall & Veccia,
1990), and when the couple is married rather than dating (Guerrero & Andersen,
1994; Willis & Briggs, 1992).
Although exhaustive research over the life span has not been conducted, there
is reason to believe that nonverbal gender differences are especially pronounced in
adolescence and the college years, when gender roles are especially salient. For
example, the gender difference in smiling is not evident in young children (Dodd,
Russell, & Jenkins, 1999; Hall, 1984); it peaks in adolescence and decreases after
that, though never completely (LaFrance, Hecht, & Levy Paluck, 2003). Most non-
verbal gender differences have been investigated among college students observed
in a laboratory situation, but evidence abounds from more naturalistic settings as
well. For example, male physicians interacting with patients engage in less smiling,
nodding, and back-channeling (saying mmm-hmm) than female physicians do
(Hall, Irish, Roter, Ehrlich, & Miller, 1994).
The nonverbal behaviors that women engage in more than men suggest more
openness, sensitivity, and involvement. In some circumstances, these traits may work
to womens disadvantage (Henley, 1977). Their smiling may make them appear
weak, too nice,or even insincere; their higher levels of gazing may connote depen-
dency; and their nonverbal style may not be distant or threatening enough to win
automatic respect in the professional world. However, if this is the case, we would
argue that the problem is with the stereotypic beliefs rather than with the behavior
per se. Furthermore, it could also be argued that it is only because of cultural blinders
that we tend to see mens behavior as normaland womens behavior as different or
in need of correction. Because most evidence suggests that the kinds of nonverbal skills
and behavior shown more by women are an asset in daily life, one could make the
case that mens nonverbal behavior style and skills are a handicap in social relations.
Womens greater emotional expressivity is consistent with the stereotype that
women are more emotional than men. However, several studies have found that
self-reports of the intensity of emotional experience do not differ when assessed
concurrently with the experience (Kring & Gordon, 1998), while studies that ask
about emotional intensity in general or retrospective terms find a consistent gender
difference in self-reported emotional intensity (Diener, Sandvik, & Larsen, 1985).
The latter difference may be biased by the influence of gender stereotypes on self-
ratings; alternatively, women may do more subsequent thinking and processing of
emotional experiences, which amplifies their intensity with the passage of time. At
any rate, although it is clear that women are more emotionally expressive than men,
it is not clear that they are also more emotional in terms of their inner experience.
Sometimes the claim is made that women are false in their nonverbal expres-
sions, for example, that their smiles are constant and insincere. An early study,
cited often, found that women tended to smile even when their words did not con-
tain congruently happy messages, but mens smiles were more in accord with their
words (Bugental, Love, & Gianetto, 1971). Bugental called womens behavior
perfidious. The label is derogatory, but if this pattern exists, it could certainly
have social impact. However, a subsequent study that tested this same hypothesis
found exactly the opposite pattern, with women being more consistent across
channels than men were (Halberstadt, Hayes, & Pike, 1988). Clearly, it is premature
to conclude that inconsistent displays are found mainly in women.
CHAPTER 12 USING NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR IN DAILY INTERACTION 385
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As with race and other group differences, male and female nonverbal differ-
ences are not large in absolute terms, and we should not overestimate the size of
these differences. Though some of them are large relative to other psychological
differences between the sexes, they are still of modest magnitude, and even the larg-
est nonverbal gender difference shows more similarity than difference between
males and females. Stated differently, a great deal of overlap exists in the male and
female repertoires. Nevertheless, there is a striking correspondence between peo-
ples beliefs about these differences and the actual magnitude of such differences
(Briton & Hall, 1995; Hall & Carter, 1999), which strongly suggests that people
can see these differences in daily life. Of course, societal beliefs can also translate
into self-fulfilling prophecies, such that men and women come to have the beha-
viors that others expect them to have (Zanna & Pack, 1975).
The gender differences are also not invariant. In fact, they vary considerably as a
function of setting and context, including the nature of the situation, the affective
tone of an interaction, other nonverbal behaviors, and the characteristics of the
other person involved (Aiello & Aiello, 1977; Hall & Halberstadt, 1986; LaFrance,
Hecht, & Levy Paluck, 2003; Putnam & McCallister, 1980). As examples of this
variation, the gender difference in gazing is much more evident when people are
within conversational distance of one another than when they are standing farther
apart. The tendency for women to smile more than men is greatest when they know
they are being observed, when they are interacting with others, when they are not
very familiar with the other people in the interaction, when the circumstances make
them feel more anxious, and when they are Caucasian. Finally, people act in the
most sex-stereotypic ways when with others of their own sex; in opposite-sex
encounters, males and females often accommodate to the others norms. So, for
example, gazing is highest between females, lowest between males, and intermediate
in malefemale interaction (Hall, 1984; Vrugt & Kerkstra, 1984). The fact that non-
verbal gender differences vary with these contextual factors demonstrates that we
still have a great deal to learn about the origins of male and female behavior.
Interpretations of sex differences in gaze have concentrated on the competing
themes of affiliation and warmth versus dominance and power. Because nonverbal
cues do not typically have fixed meanings, this ambiguity is difficult to resolve.
Smiling and gazing, for example, can have multiple meanings. However, the
visual-dominance ratio described earlier in this chapter is less ambiguous than
some other nonverbal behaviors, and it has been linked to differences in status,
power, dominance, or expertise in a variety of studies, but to our knowledge no
one has suggested that it varies with the warmth or friendliness of the interaction.
Dovidio, Brown, Heltman, Ellyson, and Keating (1988) performed two experi-
ments involving mixed-gender pairs of interactants in which the relative status of
the interactants was experimentally manipulated. When a status difference was cre-
ated between the interactants, the party having the higher statuswhether that
party was male or femalehad a higher visual-dominance ratio, consistent with
research already described. However, when status was not manipulated, men
behaved in the visually dominant way that high-status communicators display, and
women showed the less visually dominant behavior typical of people in low-status
roles. This finding suggests a connection between dominance and gender differ-
ences in gazing patterns.
386 PART V COMMUNICATING IMPORTANT MESSAGES
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The well-established finding that women score higher on tests of judging the
meanings of nonverbal cues has also been theorized to stem from dominance and
status differences (Henley, 1977). In fact, little is known about why females are so
often better at decoding nonverbal cues, despite much debate and discussion (Hall,
1984; Henley, 1977; Noller, 1986). So far, little evidence exists for the dominance-
status interpretation (i.e., that women are more accurate because they are lower in
dominance-status; Hall, Coats, & Smith LeBeau, 2005; Hall, Halberstadt, &
OBrien, 1997). Noller (1986), like most other social psychologists, believes that
females are socialized to be expert in various aspects of social interaction, including
knowing the general social rules governing interpersonal relations, the general dis-
play and decoding rules appropriate to various situations, and the more specific
rules governing the use of nonverbal cues in particular. It is societys expectation
not only that females will be attuned to social interactions, but also that they will
be responsible for how social interactions proceed. These pressures and expecta-
tions could easily produce the skill differences documented in research.
Similarly, only very limited support exists for dominance-status interpretations
for gender differences in other nonverbal behaviors (J. A. Hall, 2006). Smiling, in
particular, has been hypothesized to vary with dominance and status, such that the
lower-power person smiles more, and it has been suggested that differences in dom-
inance and status can explain why women smile more than men. However,
research on smiling relative to dominance and status finds no overall connection
between the two (Hall, Coats, & Smith LeBeau, 2005). It is likely that the amount
of smiling shown by people with different degrees of dominance or status depends
on other factors, such as how pleasant, ingratiating, hostile, nervous, or preoccu-
pied they are, not on dominance and status per se.
DECEIVING OTHERS
One of the most common communicative outcomes we seek is to persuade or influ-
ence others. In previous chapters, we cited research aimed at identifying the contri-
butions of physical attraction, distance, eye gaze, touch, and vocal cues to
perceptions of authoritativeness (expertise) and character (trustworthiness)the
two central factors in the persuasive process. But the area of influence that has cap-
tured the attention of the American public and university researchers the most in
recent years is the act of lying. Four major questions drive the research in this area:
1. What behaviors distinguish liars from truth tellers?
2. What cognitive and emotional processes are at work during acts of lying?
3. How accurate are we at detecting lies?
4. What conditions enhance our ability to detect lies?
Identifying behaviors exhibited by liars has, until recently, focused predominantly
on nonverbal signals. It was incorrectly assumed that liars could manipulate their
verbal behavior easily but could not or would not control their nonverbal behavior
to the same extent, thereby revealing they were lying. Ekman and Friesen (1969a)
believed it was more likely that clues to deception would be found in the area of
the feet and legs first, the hands next, and the face last. Because the face is more
likely to be controlled by the liar, Ekman and Friesen argued that facial clues
CHAPTER 12 USING NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR IN DAILY INTERACTION 387
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would be more difficult to detect. Ekman and Friesen (1975), however, indicated
several ways the face reveals deception, such as micromomentary expressions and
the timing and location of the expression. For example, smiles made when people
were trying to cover up negative feelings included traces of muscular actions associ-
ated with disgust, fear, contempt, or sadness (Ekman, Friesen, & OSullivan,
1988). Moreover, attempts to suppress particular facial movements, such as eye-
brow movements and smiles, are not entirely successful by those who are lying
(Hurley & Frank, 2011).
Attempts to develop a list of behaviors that distinguish liars from truth tellers
have always faced the problem that there are many types of liesprepared or not,
short answer or extended narrative, interrogated or notand many motivations
for lying, such as to protect oneself or someone else, to get out of an obligation or
promise, or to avoid conflict. For the lies that occur most in our daily interaction,
people report they are not serious, are largely unplanned, and do not make them
fearful of being caught (DePaulo, Kashy, Kirkendol, Wyer, & Epstein, 1996). In
addition, no behavior that occurs while lying is completely unique to lying (Buck,
1984; Zuckerman, DePaulo, & Rosenthal, 1981). Ekman (1992) put it this way:
There is no sign of deceit itselfno gesture, facial expression, or muscle twitch
that in and of itself means that a person is lying(p. 80). Still, attempts have been
made to examine the behavioral indicators of lying regardless of how lying was oper-
ationalized. A meta-analysis of 120 studies performed by DePaulo and colleagues
(2003) identified the following profile for liars when compared with truth tellers:
Liars are less forthcoming. As a result, they are likely to manifest shorter
responses and less elaboration; they appear to be holding back, speak at a
slower rate, and have longer response latencies.
Liars tell stories that seem less plausible and with fewer details. Thus, stories
by liars are likely to have more discrepancies and to be less engagingthat is,
they contain more word or phrase repetitions. They tend to be less direct; use
fewer self-references; are more uncertain and less fluent with more hesitations,
errors, and pauses; and tend to be presented in a less active manner with fewer
gestures.
Liars make fewer spontaneous corrections while telling their stories and are
less likely to admit they cannot remember something.
Liars make a more negative impression. Overall, they seem less cooperative,
make more negative statements, and use more words denoting anger and fear.
They are also more likely to use offensive language, to complain more and
smile less, and they seem more defensive.
Liars are more tense. Their voices are likely to have a higher pitch, their pupils
are more likely to be dilated for a longer period of time, and they are more
likely to exhibit fidgeting.
In another meta-analysis, Hartwig and Bond (2011) applied the lens model to the
detection of deceit and found that people seem to be lying when they sound uncertain
and appear indifferent and ambivalentor they provide implausible, illogical
accounts with few details, particularly few sensory details(p. 654). Importantly,
they suggest that deceit is not betrayed in a single behavioral cue, but rather seems to
be tied to the global impressions people form when they are around liars.
388 PART V COMMUNICATING IMPORTANT MESSAGES
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One behavior many people expect of liars is a sharp decrease in eye gaze.
Although this behavior may occur with some liars in some situations, it has become
so stereotypically associated with lying in this culture that liars often consciously
seek to control it. Sometimes, of course, the ability to display a normal pattern of
gaze is deficient, and the liar ends up staring. And too much gazing signals that
something is wrong, just as too little gazing does.
Although it is difficult to find behaviors that always characterize liars, it is eas-
ier to identify behaviors associated with key underlying cognitive and emotional
processes that occur during lies (Knapp, Cody, & Reardon, 1987). The two most
commonly studied processes are arousal and cognitive difficulty. Nonpathological
liars who know they are telling a high-stakes lie, and who know there will be
important consequences if they are caught, are likely to experience one or both of
these states. Nonverbally, arousal is indicated by pupil dilation, blinking, speech
errors, and higher pitch. Verbally, we might see excessive responsesfor example,
Why do you always have to question me?!”—in response to a seemingly natural,
nonthreatening question. Curt replies, or extremes in language usage, are also seen.
Obviously, people experience arousal for reasons other than lying, but aroused
truth tellers and aroused liars do not seem to behave the same. Liars commonly
experience cognitive difficulty as well. This may be manifested in speech hesita-
tions, shorter responses, pupil dilation, speech errors, incongruous verbal and non-
verbal behavior, and a lack of specific references.
Two other processes typical of the high-stakes lie involve attempted control
and the display of an affective state. Less spontaneous, or what seems to be
rehearsed behavior, would indicate attempted control. In 1991, military prisoners
of war who were forced to make anti-U.S. statements on Iraqi television were
reportedly trained prior to their capture to speak and behave in a wooden and
mechanical manner to indicate they were lying. Indirect responses to direct ques-
tions also may signal an attempt to control ones behavior. The expected affective
state is one of anxiety commonly reflected in fidgeting, stammering, and the like.
But other emotional states are also relevant to deception. Anger is very common
and is reflected in liarstendencies to be negative and disaffiliative in their
responses. Some liars feel enough guilt that looking away for long periods or cover-
ing their eyes with their hands is not uncommon. Duping delight,the pleasure
one may experience in deceiving another, occurs sometimes as well and may be
reflected in a smile at the wrong time or a sneer of contempt.
Given what we have said about the nature of liar behavior, it should be no sur-
prise that without the aid of any mechanical equipment such as a polygraph, peo-
ple are only about 50 to 60 percent accurate in identifying whether strangers are
lying to them or not. Since accuracy judgments usually combine the accuracy of
people judging truthful and deceptive speakers, and since truthful speakers are usu-
ally judged with a much higher degree of accuracy, our ability to detect liars may
be well below 50 percent (Levine, Park, & McCornack, 1999). Most studies asses-
sing accuracy are based on observer judgments, not on the observations of those
who are actually participating in the conversation. Some evidence suggests that
participants are less accurate than observers.
Enhancing our ability to detect deceit is not a simple matter of developing a
guidebook of nonverbal cues to lying. We have to think about the person who is
CHAPTER 12 USING NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR IN DAILY INTERACTION 389
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doing the lying, the nature of the lie, the characteristic of the person who is being lied
to, and the information available to or used by the person trying to detect deceit.
1. You should recognize that some people are better liars than others (Vrij,
Granhag, & Porter, 2010). If an individual has a long history of lying, he or
she might be well practiced in executing a lie even under the most trying of
circumstances, such as an interrogation.
2. You no doubt understand that lies run the gamut from innocent white lies
(e.g., No, those pants dont make your butt look big) to life-threatening
ones (e.g., a businessperson who, in the interest of profit, deliberately conceals
his or her companys practice of dumping a dangerous chemical into the water
supply from a fact-finding panel). DePaulo, Kirkendol, Tang, and OBrien
(1988) believe liars are more likely to reveal themselves nonverbally when the
lie is very important to them. They called this the motivational impairment
hypothesis. Burgoon and Floyd (2000), however, found that liars who were
highly motivated to lie often performed it more skillfully and were less apt to
be uncovered through their nonverbal behavior. Lastly, Warren, Schertler, and
Bull (2009) suggest that people may not be able to conceal emotionally arous-
ing information from others as well as nonemotionally arousing information.
3. Although there is evidence that some people, such as police interrogators, may
overestimate their lie-detection skills (Elaad, 2009), some people are indeed better
lie detectors, including professionals who are highly motivated to detect deception
and reputed to be good detectors (Ekman, OSullivan, & Frank, 1999), people
with aphasia who have poor language skills (specifically, when the detection
process involves judging emotion) (Etcoff, Ekman, Magee, & Frank, 2000),
people with a high need for cognition (i.e., they enjoy tasks requiring more
thinking) (Reinhard, 2010), and people who focus on vocal cues as a good source
of information about deception (Anderson, DePaulo, Ansfield, Tickle, & Green,
1999; Zuckerman, Spiegel, DePaulo, & Rosenthal, 1982). Lastly, people who
have received feedback during training and practice may get somewhat better
at detecting deception (deTurck, 1991; deTurck, Feeley, & Roman, 1997).
4. Analyzing both verbal and nonverbal signals may be more likely to reveal a
liar than observing either type of signal alone (Vrij, Edward, Roberts, & Bull,
2000). And it may be that decoders need a sufficient amount of time seeing
these cues in order to make more accurate judgments of truthfulness (Masip,
Garrido, & Herrero, 2009).
Recently, attention has shifted to thinking about ways of making nonverbal
cues to deception more apparent to observers. This direction makes sense for two
reasons: Cues to deception are not that strong in the first place and, as we men-
tioned earlier, lying appears to be more cognitively demanding (for most people)
than telling the truth (Hartwig & Bond, 2011; Vrij, Granhag, Mann, & Leal,
2011). Thus, additional cognitive demands could deplete the already more taxed
cognitive resources of liars, leading them to have less control over possible diagnos-
tic cues to their deception. As evidence of this, Vrij, Mann, Leal, and Fischer
(2010) found that more cues to deception were available in liars when they were
instructed to maintain eye contact with the person they were lying to (an additional
cognitive demand), and that this enabled observers to better identify them as liars.
390 PART V COMMUNICATING IMPORTANT MESSAGES
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With all this attention given to our ability to observe liar behavior, it should be
noted that this is not the way most people find out they have been lied to. Instead,
they receive information about the lie from others, they find physical evidence
related to the deception, or the liar confesses (Park, Levine, McCornack, Morrison, &
Ferrara, 2002).
Although some may bemoan the fact that our detection rate is not higher,
others believe it would be undesirable to get too accurate at detecting lies. The abil-
ity to withhold information and mislead, it is argued, is just as crucial to the well-
being of our society as disclosure, openness, and honesty (Knapp, 2008). This point
was taken to comic extreme in the movie, The Invention of Lying. The main char-
acter, played by Ricky Gervais, lives in a world in which people do not withhold
their thoughts and feelings, no matter how rude or crude they may be. Once he dis-
covers how to lie, he is able to dupe others because they assume everything he says
must be true. Although never realizing that others can lie to you would be detri-
mental, always being suspicious of others would not be much better. The TV pro-
gram, Lie to Me, plays upon the notion that nonverbal behavior is the key to
catching liars. However, in a study by Levine, Serota, and Shulman (2010), those
who watched the program were subsequently worse at detecting deceit or more
likely to think that someone who was telling the truth was being deceitful, suggest-
ing that their suspicion of others had been unnecessarily aroused by the program.
Are machines any better than human beings at detecting lies? Polygraphs,
which measure various physiological indicators, such as heart rate and blood pres-
sure, are sometimes reported to detect liars with more accuracy than most human
observers. But because they too often identify truth tellers and liars incorrectly,
they are barred as courtroom evidence in most states (Robinson, 1996; Vrij,
2000). Furthermore, polygraphs can be beaten. In one study, people whose lies
were detected at about 80 percent were given either biofeedback or relaxation
training. After they were better able to control their bodily responses, the accuracy
of the polygraphs was reduced to about 20 percent (Corcoran, Lewis, & Garver,
1978). In addition to polygraphs, many products on the market claim to measure
vocal microtremors. Like the polygraph, these devices are based on the assumption
that liars experience anxiety, and behaviors associated with anxiety will identify
them. According to Hollien (1990), these voice-stress analyzers accurately identify
liars at slightly above chancethat is, not any better than most human beings could
do on their own. A device that measures brain wave responses to crime-relevant
words or pictures presented on a computer screen, called brain fingerprinting, claims
to have been 100 percent accurate in identifying liars in 120 tests (Farwell &
Dochin, 1991; Farwell & Smith, 2001), but other researchers find the procedure to
be about half as accurate and that training can help liars reduce accuracy even
further (Feder, 2001; Rosenfeld, Soskins, Bosh, & Ryan, 2004). Currently, scientists
are using functional magnetic resonance imaging in an effort to identify brain activity
that would distinguish liars from truth tellers (Kozel et al., 2009; Monteleone et al.,
2009), but this process also faces serious theoretical, procedural, ethical, and
accuracy problems.
What about people in close relationships? Should they not be more accurate at
detecting lies? Because trust is the fundamental reason couples have close relation-
ships, either party is likely to get away with lying quite easily at first. But once
CHAPTER 12 USING NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR IN DAILY INTERACTION 391
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suspicion is aroused, those who know a persons behavior well are likely to be the best
detectors (Comadena, 1982; McCornack & Parks, 1986). However, it is not uncom-
mon for people in close relationships not to engage in the sort of monitoring necessary
to detect deception. They may not want to confront the lie, or they may be afraid of
destroying intimacy if they show distrust by their close monitoring (Knapp, 2006).
A PERSPECTIVE FOR COMMUNICATORS
Throughout this chapter, we have emphasized the idea that communicators mutu-
ally construct their reality. One persons behavior can only be understood as
we see how it interacts with the behavior of another person. In the abstract, this
POLICING YOUR FEELINGS AROUND COPS
Sooner or later, we all get pulled over by a police officer. A
sudden surge of anxiety generally accompanies the experience
of flashing lights and sirens that direct you to pull over and
bring your vehicle to a stop. You might know that your lead
foot is responsible for your predicament. However, you might
be genuinely puzzled as to what you did or did not do that
drew the attention of the man or woman in blue.
Next, after you get your license and registration out, you
roll down your window and sit there and wait.
You wonder what is going on. Your anxiety level does not
ease up.
Soon the police officer gets out, approaches your vehicle
with an expressionless face, and then says firmly, license and
registration.You hand over each with a shaky hand. The offi-
cer then says, Do you know why I pulled you over?”“No,
you reply in a shaky voice.
The thought, The cop must think Im lying or up to no
good because Im so nervous,might run through your mind.
You try controlling your anxiety, but it does not work. You
still feel anxious.
For their own protection, police officers are trained to use
their nonverbal behavior to communicate that they are in control and in charge of a situation. These nonverbal
cues of dominance as well as the police uniformasymbolofauthoritycan be anxiety provoking to you.
Police officers are also trained to read your nonverbal behavior. Ironically, seeing some anxiety from you
might be comforting to them because it suggests that getting pulled over is not a common experience for
you. Thus, you do not need to keep your anxiety in check.
Police officers will, of course, use your anxiety level as a possible clue to trouble if it seems dispropor-
tionate to the situation. For example, your anxiety level does not drop when he or she tells you that you
are just getting a warning because one of your taillights is out. However, even that nonverbal cue would
not be used in isolation. Other cuesnonverbal and verbalwould be assessed to see if further questioning
of you is warranted.
Jupiterimages/Photos.com
392 PART V COMMUNICATING IMPORTANT MESSAGES
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proposition seems reasonableone that would not be hard to memorize and recall
for a test. But what does the concept of mutual influence mean in practical applica-
tion to our everyday lives? Two things seem to be particularly important: First, if
the outcome of any transaction is the product of behavior by both interactants, it
means we must be very careful in judging and ascribing meaning to the nonver-
bal behavior of a single person or in generalizing a personsbehaviorwithone
person to all others. This does not suggest that people do not have a style of
communicating they may carry from one encounter to another. The parts of
that style that are emphasized and deemphasized, however, can change dramati-
cally depending on whom one is interacting with. Second, if the outcome of any
transaction is the product of behavior by both interactants, each must share the
responsibility for the outcome. This does not mean that in some encounters one
person may not take or deserve more of the responsibility than the other. It
does mean that we should, perhaps more than we would like to, examine our
own verbal and nonverbal behavior to determine how it contributed to the inter-
personal outcome. In social life, it is rare indeed for one person to be doing
everything right and the other to be doing everything wrong. Unpleasant out-
comes are usually constructed mutually.
These notions return us to the expectancy effects described in Chapters 1 and 8.
The most important lessons about social life probably are these: We see what we
expect to see, and what we expect of others will likely come true. Through our
verbal and nonverbal behavior, we unconsciously shape other people into confor-
mance with our expectations, in all areas of life, including educational settings
(Harris & Rosenthal, 1985), psychological experiments (Rosenthal, 1976), and
ordinary interpersonal relationships (Snyder, Tanke, & Berscheid, 1977; Spitz,
1997). Thus, your nonverbal behavior does make a difference.
SUMMARY
Every day we have to accomplish goals that
require the effective management and reading of
nonverbal signals. This chapter identified what
we know about five of those goals.
We began by discussing the various ways we
manifest our liking and disliking for others. Even
though certain nonverbal signals have been asso-
ciated with courtship and romantic flirtation, we
also know that similar behaviors occur when
people are trying to communicate friendliness,
interest, and playfulness. These quasi-courtship
behaviors can lead to misunderstandings, and
they remind us how important context is for inter-
preting nonverbal signals. The cluster of nonverbal
behavior comprising immediacy or liking behavior
can be usefully applied to a variety of situations
in which we want to signal positive responses to
strangers and acquaintances. Immediacy occurs in
established close relationships, too, but mainly
when it is important to be clear about onesfeelings,
when the relationship is threatened, or when a cou-
ple wants to communicate their closeness to outsi-
ders. Otherwise, people in close relationships
employ a more unique and varied nonverbal reper-
toire. We concluded this section by noting the ways
people adjust the intimacy level through reciprocal
or compensatory behavior.
Nonverbal behavior is also highlighted in acts
of dominance and efforts to show status. Like
intimacy, sometimes people will manifest differ-
ent nonverbal behavior when seeking dominance/
status than after they have achieved it. But, again,
context and individual differences are important.
An aspiring executive may engage in more eye
gaze while seeking the top position in the com-
pany, but another executive, equally motivated,
CHAPTER 12 USING NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR IN DAILY INTERACTION 393
Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has
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may engage in far less eye gaze with his or her
superiors as a sign of respect. There are a number
of behaviors that have been associated with dom-
inance and status. Some research indicates that
higher status men and women tend to manifest
a higher visual-dominance ratio, the tendency to
look more while speaking than listening.
Nonverbal signals are also crucial in initiating,
managing, and terminating everyday conversa-
tions. Smooth turn exchanges are negotiated
when speakers signal turn-yielding cues and lis-
teners signal turn-requesting cues. There are
times, however, when listeners do not want to
assume the speaking turn, and speakers do not
want to give it up. These, too, are highly depen-
dent on the manifestation of certain nonverbal
signals.
We tell others and ourselves who we are when
we communicate our identity through nonverbal
signals. Identity may be personal, such as with
individual personality, or it may be social, as in
race or gender. Research has found important
differences in the nonverbal behavior of men
and women, for example, but often these differ-
ences are not large.
Even though we would not like to think of
ourselves as deceivers, research indicates we
often use deception to manage our social sphere.
There is no behavior that is always associated
with lying, but research shows that liars tend to
be less forthcoming, provide fewer details, give
off a negative impression, exhibit more tenseness,
and make fewer spontaneous corrections in their
speech. Arousal and cognitive difficulty often
trigger the observed behaviors seen in high-
stakes lying, but most of us are not very accurate,
with only about a 50 to 60 percent success rate,
in identifying liars whom we do not know.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Research tells us that men typically smile,
laugh, and gaze at their conversational part-
ners far less than women do. Speculate on
why this is and the extent to which it is func-
tional or dysfunctional behavior.
2. What does it mean to collaborate in a lie?
Are collaborators and liars subject to similar
ethical standards?
3. Identify situations in which controlling behav-
ior is likely to be reciprocated, and when it is
likely to elicit compensatory behavior. Why?
4. Try to imagine a social world in which lies
could be detected accurately 99 percent of
the time. Describe it.
5. Describe how you nonverbally communicate
your romantic involvement with someone
when you are in public together. How has
the presence of a potential rival influenced
this, especially when the rival began flirting
with your significant other?
394 PART V COMMUNICATING IMPORTANT MESSAGES
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deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.